


The Lamps Left Burning

by ancientroots



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Injury, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-27
Updated: 2016-03-31
Packaged: 2018-05-29 13:23:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 25,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6376672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ancientroots/pseuds/ancientroots
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hajime's irritation spiked. He paused, and then, in a controlled, even tone: “You didn’t ask Oikawa to take the train here from Tsukuba to check on me, did you. Kaa-san.”</p><p>“Tooru-kun doesn’t mind.”</p><p>She disappeared. Yaku looked at him. “Something tells me Oikawa’s feelings weren’t the problem.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

29 August 2016

“I love you,” Oikawa said. 

Facing the cold, black glass of the shop window as he was, Hajime couldn’t see his best friend’s expression. Just the shadow of the moon, rendered almost colourless, and the blurred lines of Oikawa himself, hands in his pockets and face tilted towards the clear sky. There were no stars to be seen in Tsukuba, so close to Tokyo. But Hajime was struck with a sense of déjà vu, as if, were he to say the wrong thing here, now, this was a night he would be doomed to repeat.

The thought made him smile. It was a real Oikawa thing to think. 

The idiot must have seen him, and inferred something stupid from it, because his shoulders hunched. Hajime rolled his eyes, turned to face him properly. “Oi,” he said. “Shittykawa – ”

 

10 April 2017

“I thought we asked them for an ensuite. I’m going to go and ask them – ”

“There aren’t any ensuite rooms on the ground floor, anata, they told us that – ”

“What if he needs to go to the bathroom at night, it’s too far – ”

The rip of the tape, and the screech as Yaku Morisuke pulled it off the box, failed to drown out Kaa-san’s and Tou-san’s voices. The libero arched an eyebrow at him. “Aren’t you going to chip in?”

Hajime cast a glance at the half-closed door. Then at the boxes and suitcases still littering his new room. The single cupboard, the bare desk, the window; the old sort where you had to release a latch and then push it upwards. Kaa-san had done that the moment they’d come in, saying in that tremulous voice that signalled she was at the end of her tether: there, sweetheart, there’s a nice breeze. Isn’t that nice?

“I told them not to help,” Hajime said.

“What? You were going to lug all this from the train station to your dorm?”

“I told them not to help me unpack.”

The rip of a second piece of tape, and the screech as he pulled it off, didn’t block out the wryness on Yaku’s face. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were mad at them.”

Yaku didn’t know better. They’d known each other for a semester. Nothing more. But he was here, helping Hajime bloody open boxes, fifty minutes by train from his own campus in Mita with the rest of the second years, so Hajime kept his ungrateful mouth shut. He started pulling books out instead. 

“Where’s Oikawa, then?”

His answer was sharper than it needed to be. “Unpacking his own stuff in Tsukuba.”

Yaku’s smile flattened. Maybe it was a good thing that Kaa-san decided to poke her head in just then. Oikawa might have dubbed Yaku the second Refreshing-kun the first time they met, but Nekoma’s ex-libero had a much more fragile lid over his temper. 

“Hajime, sweetheart,” his mother said. “Will you be all right sharing a bathroom?”

What was he supposed to say to that? No? Install a shower for me, in this room, right now? He said, “Yeah. You and Tou-san can go home, Kaa-san. You shouldn’t get home too late. Tou-san still has to work tomorrow.”

Whatever he thought about it personally, Yaku kept his head down, and concentrated on pulling books out of the box. 

Hajime added, “Yaku will help me.”

A moment’s tension. The Star Wars DVDs that Oikawa had snuck into the bottom of the box, the bastard, dropped onto Hajime’s bare mattress. 

“Thank you so very much, Yaku-kun,” said Kaa-san, smiling her tired, wrinkled smile that always, without fail, managed to irritate Hajime. “I’ll just get Tou-san and – oh,” her head slotted back in between the door and its frame. “Tooru-kun will be here tonight, won’t he?”

His irritation spiked. He paused, and then, in a controlled, even tone: “You didn’t ask Oikawa to take the train here from Tsukuba to check on me, did you. Kaa-san.”

“Tooru-kun doesn’t mind.”

She disappeared. Yaku looked at him. “Something tells me Oikawa’s feelings weren’t the problem.”

The second box was full of clothes. He leaned off his mattress, tugged open a cabinet drawer, and began to stuff it with shirts. Stuffed too full, it refused to shut. So he slammed it into place. The lonely edge of a red sleeve stuck up like a flag. 

Oikawa would definitely have called him out on it. Yaku let it go. Said instead, “You want to go to a party? It’s tonight, about ten minutes from here, so it’s not like it’s far. You can bring Oikawa, if you want.”

The spring breeze was cool and light. Sun spattered the carpet, the opened boxes and suitcases, the boys sitting on the bed. It was a warmer spring than it would have been in Sendai, but it reminded Hajime of another window. Another room, another sun, and another two boys on a bed, much younger than he was now. Without a care in the world.

That memory – it was a lie. When had they ever been without a care? 

The truth of this calmed him. Reminded him that a problem was just that: a problem. A feeling was just that: a feeling. Nothing he couldn’t control. “Here?” he asked, more amiably. “Aren’t you lot living around Mita? In poky student flats?”

Yaku crawled off the bed with an armful of books, started to shelve them with more care than Hajime would have. A series of soft, faded manga volumes, and an English-language hardback on aliens. Another of Tooru’s sneak-ins. 

“Kurata got a place at the Omori international dorm, lucky fool, just like you, and Tanaka’s girlfriend is a first year whose parents don’t want her living in a dorm. So, house party, here. Anyway,” his eyes, several shades lighter than Oikawa’s, slid over and fixed on Hajime. “This way, you’ll get to know some first years.”

He’d already decided to be in a good mood. “I’m not going to be here long,” he said. “If I can get all my credits this semester, then – ”

“It’s not that we don’t want you at Mita with us.” Soothing. The second Refreshing-kun, indeed. “But if you’re going to be repeating part of your first year, you might as well make friends with, you know, first years. You can’t keep commuting fifty minutes just to hang out.”

He looked down at his leg. Both of his feet planted on the floor like this, he looked like any regular person. The shoes were just regular shoes, weren’t they? But Hajime knew the difference. He could feel the rough weave of the carpet under one thin-soled shoe, and under the other: nothing. 

There were fifty steps down to the subway station. 

“Yeah,” he said. When he looked up, he realised that it must have been a while since he’d spoken. Yaku had stopped shelving books. Was just standing there, arms at his side, looking uncertain. “Yeah,” he repeated. “I can’t.”

He went to the party. After texting Oikawa to say, don’t come, Shittykawa, if you know what’s good for you. Maybe he could have been nicer about it, but then, when had he ever been nice to Oikawa? 

Some god somewhere must have seen it differently though, because it was the shittiest party he’d ever been to. First, the lift didn’t work. So Hajime had to go step by step up four flights of stairs, like he was a kid playing jan-ken-pon on his grandfather’s front porch in Shikama, and not an adult on an empty, echoing stairwell, with sweat starting to trickle down his neck. At least he was late. Nobody to stand around uneasily, waiting for him to make his way up the same stairs at twice the time. 

One foot, swing the second foot on. One foot, swing the second foot on. By the time he made it to the second floor, the rhythm was pounding in his mind like the jingle from an annoying advertisement. 

Then there was the crush of shoes at the front door. He used to fling his every which way too, but now, he put them down at the corner, neatly, and straightened to find that Yaku was nowhere in sight. Nobody else he really knew, either. Kurata, Tanaka, Suzuki-san. They’d all gone and hidden somewhere, and left him amongst a bunch of second-years he only knew by sight, and complete strangers. 

Someone pressed a beer into his hand. Clapped his shoulder. Probably some drunk idiot who thought he was his best friend. The music, some rock band cranked up so loud that they seemed to be drumming the very walls, drummed into Hajime’s skull too. He bore it for five minutes. He could hear Oikawa’s shitty, sly voice in his head, saying, aw, Iwa-chan, I’m so proud of you – And then he gave up and escaped onto the balcony. 

Banged the beer onto the railing, and put his head in his hands. 

The music was only minutely less loud. 

And then, fuck, he realised he wasn’t alone.

“Ano,” said the girl. Nervously. “Are you all right?”

Smooth, Oikawa crowed. Real smooth, Iwa-chan. 

He dropped his hands. Worked his expression into something less frightening. When he could no longer feel wrinkles tightening his forehead, he said, “I’m sorry. I’m just stressed out. From moving, and stuff.” He bowed. “Iwaizumi Hajime.”

She smiled. “Akaike Rei.”

The smile changed her face. Made her look pretty. In a way. If you were into tall and lanky, with large, dark eyes, and voices like chocolate. Which, Hajime realised, he was. Stupidly, and completely without suave, he coughed. On nothing. And blushed. 

Akaike was clearly a lot less socially awkward. She said, “I’m a history major. What about you?”

“Right,” he said. With more gratitude than was cool. “Me too. Do you have a – a – what do you think of the Sengoku era?”

The Oikawa in his head cackled. It annoyed him, that he was thinking of Oikawa right now. He pushed the idiot out of his thoughts, and focused instead on Akaike’s reply. 

Like that, sometime past one, he found himself walking her back the dorm. “That’s why,” she said, voice rising in her passion. “I disagree with the way that Nobunaga Concerto warps history – ”

“What,” he laughed. “Go on.”

She seemed to have a habit of walking faster when excited. A few paces ahead of him now, she came to a stop. Locked her hands together behind her back. The sakura trees, in full bloom above her, seemed to glow in the light of the slice of moon. Unlike him, she’d drunk some of the alcohol, and her pale face was flushed. Another few paces ahead, the girls’ dormitory was dark. Most people were asleep, on this their first night before university kicked into gear, or out partying. “You didn’t have to come the whole way,” she said. “You don’t – you’re at the Tsunashima dorm, aren’t you. The one with all the foreigners. I’m sorry. I should have said something.”

A deep affection for her welled in his heart. Less because of her consideration, and more because – this was the end. “Of course I should’ve walked you,” he said. “I’ll say goodnight, then.”

Her voice was soft. “Goodnight.”

It was fucking late, and he was tired, so it took twice as long to get to his dorm. But as he entered the gloom of the ground floor, rounded the corner into the stark lit corridor, at the end of which was his room, he was whistling. One of the terrible rock songs that they’d been playing. 

So caught up was he in this that it took him a moment to recognise the lump of spring coat, glasses, headphones, and dark, wavy hair in front of his door. Oikawa’s laptop was open on his lap, but he himself was asleep in that outrageous way that only his best friend could be: head tilted at a horrific angle, mouth wide open, legs akimbo on the tiles. Hajime smacked himself in the face. 

“Oi!” And then, remembering the time, in a whisper, “You idiot.”

A mumble.

Hajime leaned down, and slammed the laptop shut. At the sound, Oikawa jerked to attention. Eyes blinking rapidly. They landed on Hajime’s face, cross-eyed. Then, slowly, coming into focus. He sounded like there was a sock stuffed down his throat. “Iwa-chan. What are you doing here?”

“What do you mean, what am I doing here? This is my room! In my university.”

“Iwa-chan,” a whine. “You’ll wake everyone up, yelling like that. Be more considerate.”

He forced himself to take a breath. Another breath. “Oikawa, I told you not to come. And don’t sleep with your glasses on. You’ll break them.”

Oikawa was going to ask him if he was his mother. It was right there, on the tip of his tongue. Hajime could see it in his eyes. But he must have been more tired than he looked, because he swallowed it. Said, instead, “I had bucketloads of time, Iwa-chan, you wouldn’t believe it, but the renovations for the gym won’t be done until tomorrow! So I came to see you.”

He hadn’t had to look to know what Oikawa was listening to on his headphones. “So, go to fucking sleep and wake up bright and early tomorrow, Shittykawa. That’s what you should have done.”

Sometimes, despite what had happened, despite everything, it was difficult to remember that he and Oikawa were older, now. That time had passed, that they had changed. That Oikawa could react to age-old reprimands not with passive-aggressive hostility, or deliberate obliviousness, but with a slow smile. 

Back in school, their friends had thought it a superpower, how Hajime knew when Oikawa was really happy, and when he was going to do something cruel or stupid because he was actually upset. He used to think, that was stupid. He used to think, it came down to whether you were really looking, or not. 

It hadn’t used to throw him off. 

Oikawa jumped to his feet, coat and scarf sliding off his shoulders and puddling on the floor. “Come on, Iwa-chan! The trains aren’t running now, so I’ll just have to stay over.”

The strange, uneasy feeling didn’t disappear. In fact, it grew stronger, a tightness in his chest. Even recalling how he had felt, saying goodnight to Akaike, couldn’t make it go away. If it wouldn’t go, he would have to ignore it. “Shittykawa,” he growled. It was the expected response. 

As expected, Oikawa drummed his knuckles on the door. The sound grated on Hajime’s ears. “Open up!”

It was times like these when Hajime really missed his leg. Sure, he hadn’t drunk anything, bless fuck, since he didn’t want to imagine what it would have been like, to navigate those four flights of stairs while off his face, but exhaustion settled on him like a rock, and it was only necessity, and Oikawa’s cajoling, that got him to heave his towel, clothes, liner rack, and shower bench from his room to the bathroom. And then, having turned on the showerhead, rubbed some shampoo into his hair, and let it all be swept off by lukewarm water, it took him a full sixty seconds of staring blankly at his prosthesis, lying on the floor beside the stall, and his liner on its rack like a giant, erect penis – Oikawa’s words – before he could make himself reach for the second. 

Shit, he thought, as he walked back to his room, dragging the towel desultorily through his hair with one hand, shower bench and liner rack tucked under the other arm. He hadn’t unpacked the tramadol. 

The unease grew; it was difficult to breathe. 

He kicked open the door with his foot. And saw the tramadol sitting on his desk, next to a waterbottle. Oikawa himself was lying on Hajime’s bed, legs once again akimbo, taking up the mattress like he owned it. He sat up when Hajime came in, rubbing at his left eye with the heel of his hand. His other hand, he stuck out. “Hurry up and take off your leg, Iwa-chan. You have to wash the liner.”

It was such an innocent statement. It was obvious. He had to wash the liner for his prosthesis. If he didn’t, he could look forward to foul odours, rashes, and blisters. Even if Oikawa hadn’t said that, even if he hadn’t been there, Hajime would have had to do it. What point was there in exploding?

“Don’t tell me what I already know!”

The sleepiness leached out of Oikawa’s frame. He was like a cat that way, easily startled, just a whisper in the night, and already his back was arched and his tail was straight. Oikawa’s hand dropped onto the bed. The same cross patch blanket that Hajime had been using since he was ten years old. The same blanket that he and Oikawa had huddled under way back when he still called his best friend by his first name. The memory made him – for no reason at all, none of this had a reason – angrier. 

“Iwa-chan,” Oikawa said, cautiously. “I’m sorry, I – ” 

“I told you not to come!”

He was starkly aware that at this volume, he was going to wake somebody. Anybody. 

The window hadn’t been closed since Kaa-san and Tou-san left late that afternoon. But the spring breeze wasn’t cool, wasn’t light anymore. It was nine degrees out. It slid cold against Hajime’s shower-flushed skin. 

“I’m sorry,” Oikawa said. 

“You didn’t have to come,” he said. “You and Kaa-san and Tou-san,” he had to breathe. He had to calm down. But he felt like a spring wound too tight; he felt that, if he didn’t say it all, get it all out, he wouldn’t be able to stop. “It’s been months. Months. You have to stop coddling me. You didn’t have to come, Oikawa. I can look after myself.”

The aftermath of his explosion was silence. A suspension, like dust in the air, drifting, drifting towards the floor.

Quiet. “I wasn’t saying you couldn’t, Iwa-chan. I just wanted to see you.”

He laughed. It was sharp-edged, and forced. 

“I did,” Oikawa said. “I wanted to make sure you were okay, for myself. That’s got nothing to do with your capabilities.” He swung his legs over the side of the bed. Paused, and then said, “I should go – piss.”

He brushed Hajime. Who felt that instinctive desire, ingrained into him since childhood, to reach out. To catch him. But, unlike his younger self, Hajime hesitated.

The door clicked shut. And the chance was gone. 

 

Outside Tsunashima Student Dormitory, in the grassy strip of backyard where students took their rubbish to be thrown into huge, colour-coded dumpsters, where crushed cigarettes lined the wall and the high, wire fence, Tooru leaned against the door, hands stuck in the relative warmth of his pockets, and exhaled. 

It was a clear night, the moon just a crescent slice in a black hole. The moon on the 29th of August last year had been about the same size, but in the opposite direction, like a mirror. The thought made him smile. 

Maybe he had stepped through a mirror, through the looking glass. Maybe he was in a world where anything could happen, even the turning back of time. 

On the 29th of August, after a summer alone, a summer clawing desperately for something that seemed farther and farther out of his reach, he had said to Iwa-chan, “I love you.”

Iwa-chan had been so quiet. A smile starting suddenly on his face, as if he thought it were a joke, maybe he had thought it was a joke –

And then Tooru had heard it. He heard it before he saw it. Of all the things that happened that night, of everything, that was the one fact he would never forget, like it would have made a difference. Maybe it would have. He wouldn’t ever know. 

Tires screeched on gravel, bumped up onto concrete, stark headlights struck his eyes, blinding him, and – well. He remembered familiar, warm fingers crushing his sleeve. He remembered the darkness of Iwa-chan’s face, frightening, twisted into a desperate rage. And then he remembered nothing. 

“Well, Iwa-chan,” he said to the turned-around moon, the rubbish bags and the dead cigarettes. “I can’t turn back time. But I can do the next best thing. So just wait a bit. Okay?”

Glancing at his watch, he determined that he had been out long enough. Iwa-chan had probably calmed down by now. Pulling open the heavy, metal door, he walked back into the gloom of the dormitory. It swung slowly, ponderously shut behind him.


	2. Chapter 2

This conversation had become unnecessary.

The coach’s office wasn’t big. The desk sat right in the middle, with about two feet of space on either side, and the window at the back thrown open to admit air infused with morning cool, and distant, disembodied birdsong. Tooru sat on a foldable chair in front of the desk in his sports clothes, watching the man’s mouth move. Sometimes, the words penetrated the fog of his mind. Other times, his thoughts meandered, lighting on his unfinished assignments, his laundry, flitting regularly to the pain in his knee. He would have to ice it, later.

“ – so I don’t want you to keep ignoring your studies as you have been. Do you understand?”

He recognised that he should respond right about now. It took a moment for his neurons to fire. And then he grinned, and said, “I understand, Coach.”

Coach Yanagida hadn’t entrenched himself in his position over the last twenty years to have the wool pooled over his eyes by a twenty year old. His shelf of a forehead collapsed into wrinkles. “It’s good that you want to improve, Oikawa. I’ll be the first person to say that. But balance is important. You have to have balance. Yamamoto tells me you’ve been practising in the gym after hours again.”

Damn Yacchan. “It was only for tryouts,” he said. “Now those are over, I’ll stop. I have lots of homework, you know, Coach. Being an economics major.”

The frown deepened. “As I said, Oikawa. I hope that you won’t be too discouraged – ”

“As I said,” he interrupted. “I’m not. I just wanted to know how I could improve, Coach. I think you made the right choice. Takano-kun really is the better choice. He’s talented.”

He listened for the poison in his own voice. Strangely, it was absent.

It had to be the late nights, he surmised. His mind felt as if it were running on empty. A hollow tank, all the gears trying to get along on what they could scrape off the walls. His knee ached.

Yanagida seemed to have decided to let his impertinence go. “All right, then. Think about what I said. A few improvements go a long way." 

And yet, he had wasted another twenty minutes talking about how Tooru really should be focusing on his studies. Twenty minutes he could have spent doing just that. 

Shutting the door behind him, Tooru stood in the hallway for a moment. Practice had ended forty minutes ago. There might still be people in the gym, getting in some extra practice. In the locker room, mucking about. It was a Friday. No one was eager to get to class. Tooru looked down at his shoes – worn out, he needed to get new ones – and tried to summon some feeling. The faster he got it out, the faster it would be over.

Nothing. 

His shoes squeaked on the linoleum. True to his prediction, passing the open doors to the gym, he could hear voices and the thud of volleyballs on the polished, wooden floor. Someone laughed. Tooru recognised it; Takano’s guffaw. He was a cheerful person, was Takano.

Standing in the shadow of the doors, Tooru contemplated entering. The pain in his knee intensified, a key screwing itself tighter into the wrong lock. Maybe not.

Lifting his gaze, he stared at the door to the locker room. The last person to have left hadn’t shut it properly. It swung minutely, the poorly oiled hinges creaking. He could hear voices inside, too.

When Tooru’s feet carried him past it, and out into the dew-damp morning, he almost felt relieved. As if he had been afraid, just for a second there, that he would look at that door, think about his teammates, all of whom had seen him approach the coach and ask to speak to him, and feel nothing.

Who knew how much later, Yacchan found him sitting on a bench beside the outdoor pool, drinking a bottle of 100 Plus. Tooru raised the bottle towards him, in a toast. “Congratulations on making the starting lineup.” 

His friend swiped the bottle, stuck out his tongue. “No thanks to you. Seriously, who _used_ to have to get out of bed to drag you out of the gym?”

Tooru’s smile widened. When Iwa-chan had met Yacchan, he had demanded to know how Tooru had found someone as insane and childish as he was, only to realise that actually, Yacchan had a good head on his shoulders. He just didn’t like to show it much. Something about being the youngest of five siblings, he’d told Tooru once, lying on the court at gone three in the morning. You just got used to whining and throwing tantrums to get your way. And playing the spoiled, golden boy.

Yacchan shook the bottle at him. “Wait, don’t answer. Let me guess. Iwaizumi.” He narrowed his eyes. “What are you doing out here, then? I hope you’re not sulking.”

He held his hands up in parley. “Of course not, Yacchan! I feel,” he paused. “I feel pretty okay about it. I mean, it was obvious yesterday that Takano-kun was going to get the spot. Coach has me on reserve, so,” he shrugged. “It’s not a complete loss.” A peace sign. “I’ll be there to cheer you on next week! Since you don’t have a boyfriend.” 

A frown. People were always frowning at him, lately. In the past, it used to be just Iwa-chan. He wondered if it was him. Was he slipping? But unlike Iwa-chan and like Yanagida, Yacchan let it go. Maybe five siblings did that to you, too. There wasn’t time to go chasing down every little thing. “Anyway,” Yacchan said. “Just train like you always do. If Coach puts you in for even five minutes, you can show that scout from JTEKT Stings what you’ve got.”

He gave his friend two thumbs-up. “Roger that. You should go get changed, Yacchan. Don’t you have a lecture at ten?”

His friend glanced at his watch, cursed. Launched himself towards the sliding glass doors, and then stopped, pivoted on his foot. “Don’t _you_?”

“Oh,” he said, airily. “I was thinking of skipping – ”

He was hauled up by his collar, and dragged into the relative darkness of the gym.

The thing that Yacchan and Yanagida didn’t seem to understand was, there was no real point in going to class when he couldn’t even concentrate. He tried, he really did. He sat next to his friend midway up the enormous lecture hall, laptop open before him, and took notes. It wasn’t as if the professor even sucked. Anyone who could get a class to laugh in an accounting lecture had to be good, in Tooru’s book.

It was just that about ten minutes in, his mind started to wander. The professor’s voice was blotted out, by snatches of last night’s volleyball replays, bits of what Yanagida had said to him, repeated forwards and backwards and sometimes flipped inside-out so that they came out like gobbledygook, and the feel of a volleyball in his hand, smooth and hard. More recently, since the second year had started, really, even these memories had given way to blankness. When Tooru stopped concentrating, he found himself wandering down bleak, grey paths, and once it did occur to him that maybe he should wake up, he should pay attention, he couldn’t remember what he had been thinking about at all.

That lost time; it scared him a little.

Still, he put it out of his mind easily enough. There wasn’t any point in dwelling on it. Instead, he climbed up to his room on the third floor of Hirasuna Building One, dropped his sports bag, schoolbag, and a sandwich onto his desk, and flopped onto his bed. Shut his eyes to the glare of the afternoon sun through the window grill. The building was eerily silent. Most people would be eating out about now, wolfing down something before heading to more lectures, more classes. Tooru should be, too.

His leg had stopped hurting. 

Sitting back up, he grabbed the sports bag and – an afterthought – the sandwich, and headed to the gym. If Yacchan took him to task later, he could just explain that the gym was a whole lot closer to Hirasuna than the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences. Surely Yacchan could understand _that_.

Like that, a week passed, so much sand slipping through Tooru’s fingers. It seemed strange, on the second Friday, to not be rushing off to the bus station with his homework stuffed at the bottom of his sports bag. To not have about five and a half hours watching past games, and falling asleep, and almost missing his stop, in front of him. To not be crawling into his own bed at home at eleven p.m., or sometimes Iwa-chan’s. The desire to call his best friend was almost physical.

But Iwa-chan wanted space.

So he left his phone in his room, and practised his jump serve under the glare of the court lights until pain lanced through his knee like a knife, and he had to stop. The locker room was locked at this time of night, so he sat with his back to the wall in the echoing gym, pressed a plastic bag of cold water from the drinking fountain to his knee, and told himself, tomorrow.

Tomorrow, when the match started, when his team or the other team made first serve, he would feel excited. Nervous. A pounding inferiority.

Back in his room, he gave up, and texted Iwaizumi: Hey, Iwa-chan! -___- I’ll be around Hiyoshi tomorrow, so I’ll drop by! I know you miss me :D :D

The beeping of his phone woke him, thank fuck, two hours later. An hour before he was supposed to meet the rest of the team at the subway station. Sitting up, he realised that he had fallen asleep in his sports clothes. The smell of dried sweat rose off him. He fumbled for his phone, checked the text ID. From Yacchan: You better be up.

He tamped down on his disappointment. Obviously, Iwa-chan wasn’t going to be awake at this godawful hour, was he? On a Saturday.

Asia University was a decent opponent, as opponents went. Not dangerous enough that Yanagida felt the need to sub Tooru in to mix up the game a little, not easy enough that he subbed him in just for the hell of it. Their wing spiker was a funny little kid. Reminded Tooru of Chibi-chan from Karasuno. And of course, he couldn’t think of Chibi-chan without remembering Tobio-chan. Standing on the sidelines, watching the ball fly back and forth across the net, hearing the thud of it, the squeak and skid of shoes on the court, the shouts of his teammates and the observers in the stands, he welcomed the old spark he felt at Tobio’s name in his heart.

It spurred him to cup his hands around his mouth when Yacchan executed a particularly good wipe, and shout too. The ball bounced out of bounds and smashed into the whitewashed wall of the gym.

The scout from JTEKT Stings, who stood out from the observers like a sore thumb in his faded Olympics 2012 T-shirt and track pants, lingered to speak to Takano. Tooru watched Takano take the man’s card. A plain white piece of paper. Dark-eyed and serious, he only nodded as the scout spoke. Nodded, and nodded at regular intervals like a puppet.

Acid, hot and white, washed over Tooru’s thoughts. Left him blinking, a little numb. Nothing – for a week. And then –

“Oikawa?” Yacchan was standing right in front of him. The last of their teammates still in the gym. Everyone else had filed out and disappeared, probably to the locker rooms to change. His friend’s hair was slick with sweat. His face and neck glistened with it.

With the same suddenness, Tooru felt like being sick.

He stepped back, waving his hands, dismissive. “Just zoned out for a minute there, Yacchan! Nothing to worry about. You played a good game.”

The wing spiker’s gaze slid over his shoulder, towards Takano and the scout. He frowned, opened his mouth. 

“Look,” Tooru said. “I promised Iwa-chan I would drop by – ”

“Keio’s _an hour_ from here – ” 

“ – so tell Coach I had to run, okay?” 

He fled out of the gym, stood for a moment in the temporary quiet of the hallway. Just breathing. Aware that in seconds, Yacchan would recover from his current status of gobsmacked and come after him. He tried to let the terror slough out of him, like so much sewage. But it had nowhere to go.

Iwa-chan, he thought. Iwa-chan would know what to do.

What a nonsensical thought. What would Iwa-chan do?

But it was enough to get him moving again. Step by step, towards the locker room. He would just go and see Iwa-chan, the train ride was an hour long, he would have calmed down by then, he would have forgotten Takano, Chibi-chan, _Tobio_ by then, and –

At one in the afternoon on a Saturday, the trains weren’t too packed. Tooru found a seat, shoved his sports bag underneath, and stared out the window at the grim, dirty platform zipping past, until the train was in the tunnel proper, and there was nothing to stare at but a hard, black mirror, in which was his tired, scared face. 

Iwa-chan still hadn’t texted him back. That was okay. He would just go to a café near his dorm and wait for him. It was a Saturday, and Iwa-chan was a worrywart. He was probably studying, like Tooru was supposed to. Or he was hanging out with someone somewhere, maybe Yaku from Nekoma –

But Iwa-chan wasn’t doing any of these things. He was right there. Opposite Tooru, a busy five-lane street between them. The pedestrian light was a commanding red; the air was thick with exhaust smoke; the girl pressed so close to Iwa-chan in the crush of people waiting to cross - she was wearing a pale pink summer dress over striped tights. Flicking her gaze up to see what Iwa-chan was staring at, Tooru saw that her eyes were almost the same shade of his own. A dark, chocolate brown.

He let Iwa-chan and the girl cross over to his side of the street. She had small feet. In her sandals with their complicated ties, her ankles looked delicate.

“Oikawa,” said his best friend. “Did you just get here? Why didn’t you call?”

Tooru turned from the girl, fixed his biggest smile on his face. “I texted, Iwa-chan. You didn’t answer, so I thought you were busy.”

“And that,” Iwa-chan barked. “Didn’t make you think, maybe you shouldn’t come?”

I missed you, was on the tip of his tongue. He swallowed it. But it must have showed on his face, somehow, something must have showed, because his best friend’s forehead wrinkled. “What’s wrong?”

How horrible Iwa-chan was. To look so concerned when Tooru wanted nothing more than to whine, and wail, and possibly ruin whatever this was with this girl with the decent fashion sense.

Tooru relented, too. Airily, he said, “I missed you, Iwa-chan. But I see that you’re on a date with a pretty lady, so I’ll just – I’ll just wait for you at your dorm, won’t I?” He held out his hand. “Keys.”

The girl watched this exchange between them with a bewilderment bordering on fright. “Iwaizumi-san?”

Iwa-chan’s frown deepened. He didn’t deny that it was a date. Rather, he fished in his pockets for his keys, and dropped them in Tooru’s hand. “Stay there, and don’t do anything stupid.”

Tooru’s fingers closed over the cold metal. The light had turned green again. He saluted the girl, and left the two of them there, on their own again. Just in reverse, on the opposite side of the street from before. Just turned-around.

In Iwa-chan’s room, he didn’t bother to turn on the lights. Just sat on the bed, head buried in his best friend’s pillow, lost in the shadows behind his eyelids.

It was good that Iwa-chan had found a girl. _One_ of them should, if only for mocking purposes, and it wasn’t like Tooru hadn’t had his share of high school sweethearts. Now that he was too busy for such things, it was natural that Japan’s disappointed female university population should turn to cavemen like Iwa-chan to mend their broken hearts.

It was good that Iwa-chan had found a girl, so Tooru wished that his heart would stop squeezing all the blood out of itself.

A long, long time later – at least, to Tooru, it seemed that way – the door opened. Iwa-chan said, voice gruff, “You should have locked it.”

He counted to three. And then lifted his head, grinned. “How was I to know when you were going to get back? What if you came back in the wee hours of the morning, and I was sleeping? Surely you wouldn’t want the whole floor to know you were getting some – ”

“Shut up.”

His best friend locked the door himself, kicked at Tooru until he’d moved over enough for the two of them to fit on the bed, their backs to the wall, their feet stretched out before them. Iwa-chan snatched his pillow back. “You better not have got snot on this. 

“What makes you think I would be crying?”

“Because you look it, shit-head." 

The digital clock on Iwa-chan’s bedside table read: two-thirty. Half an hour or less since they had met at the pedestrian crossing. Tooru meant to soften his voice, to say – something – lightly, amiably. What came out was crystalline. “Who was she, then? What’s her name?”

“Akaike. Akaike Rei.”

“When did you meet?”

“At a party.”

“When was that?”

Iwa-chan’s fingers tightened on the edge of his pillowcase. At first, Tooru thought he was going to smack him with it. Instead, he said, “She didn’t ask me.”

The window was shut tight. The air in the room was still, heavy. With Hajime’s leg stuck out like it was, the hem stopped short of covering his prosthesis completely. Tooru would have liked to say it didn’t bother him. That he saw Iwa-chan only for the person he was, and nothing more. But Tooru, as anyone could attest to, had a shitty personality. It bothered him. He wasn’t used to it. He hated even looking at Iwa-chan’s leg.

It reminded him that Iwa-chan wasn’t just Iwa-chan, anymore. And Tooru wasn’t just Tooru. That wasn’t all they were to each other.

“She didn’t ask me,” Iwa-chan said. “How I lost my leg. I was waiting for her to ask, all the way to the end, and she didn’t. I,” a pause. “I liked that.” 

His heart squeezed itself. He ignored it. He smiled past it. He said, “Good for you, Iwa-chan. She sounds like a keeper.”

The inches between them was like an abyss. Light and silence dripped into it. There was no birdsong here, on the ground floor of a building separated from a minor, but congested street by just a strip of concrete and a paper-thin wall.

For some reason, Iwa-chan sounded almost guilty. When he sounded guilty, he also sounded angry. “So? What’s wrong? Why did you come see me?”

Because, he wanted to say. Easily. As if he hadn’t spent the past week worrying about it, brooding over it, tearing out his metaphorical hair – of course he wouldn’t have torn out his precious _real_ hair. It was Iwa-chan, he thought. The same way he had thought, one day when he was eighteen years old and they were studying for the entrance exams together in the singularly unromantic location of Seijou’s library, oh, it looks like I’m in love.

Being with Iwa-chan made it easier to see himself.

And so, it came to him that he should say, just then: I wanted to see you, because I don’t think I like it anymore. Volleyball.

He was about to say it, before the meaning, the implication of the words sunk in. And he froze.

“Oikawa?” Iwa-chan waved a hand in front of his face.

He couldn’t. 

“Shittykawa.”

How else was he going to –

“ _Oi_." 

He didn’t have a choice. “Like I said,” and he grabbed Iwa-chan’s pillow back, hugged it to his chest. “I missed you. That’s all." 

Iwa-chan’s mouth thinned. “It’s got nothing to do with volleyball, then?” 

How weird it was, hearing that word out of Iwa-chan’s mouth. They hadn’t talked about volleyball for – well. It wasn’t a taboo subject. It just didn’t come up often, anymore. Not since the last time they’d argued about it in Iwa-chan’s room, and Tooru had punched his best friend in the face, and Iwa-chan had shoved him off the bed and into the bookcase, and Tooru ended up with a mild concussion courtesy of the Collins English Dictionary Unabridged that fell on his head.

He could still remember the horror slamming onto Iwa-chan’s face, and hardening there like clay.

“Nope,” Tooru said now. “Nothing to do with that.”

His best friend studied him. The steady, skin-peeling stare that Tooru had known since childhood. And then, inexplicably, he let it go. Snatched his pillow back and jerked his head at the cabinet. “I’ve got your _Star Wars_ shit. Since I lugged it all the way from Sendai, we better watch it.”

Tooru plucked the first DVD off the top of the cabinet, reached for Iwa-chan’s laptop, crowing, “Well, then, we have to start from Episode Four and – ”

The sun sank. The sky exploded into an evening wash of gold, then fell to night. The screen grew brighter, reflecting in Iwa-chan’s eyes, gleaming off the dark surfaces of the mugs of Coke and the pizza Tooru demanded that they order.

If either of them felt that the silence between them had taken on a different tone, had descended into a certain, mellow sadness, they left it unsaid.


	3. Chapter 3

“So,” said Anzai-sensei, ballpoint flying over her pad, the paper cast into deep shadow by the intense sunlight that poured into the room from the floor-to-ceiling windows, and drenched them both. Light motes saturated the air; threw the stray hairs on top of Anzai-sensei’s head into sharp relief, lined them with gold. “We’ll add some extra padding for you, but have you thought anymore about getting a new prosthesis?”

Hajime grimaced. “Is that necessary? My stump’s stopped shrinking so much lately.”

She pointed the butt of her pen at him. “That’s exactly why, Iwaizumi-kun. Your residual limb size is stabilising. Now would be a good time to transition to a definitive prosthesis. One that is a better fit for you. I was thinking, a microprocessor knee.”

That would cost Tou-san eight months of his salary, even with the insurance.

“It’s a good investment. You won’t have to think so much about how to walk, and you’ll feel safer going up and down stairs, and such. And this time, your prosthesis should last three to five years." 

He felt his mouth twitch despite himself. “Sounds nice.”

“Of course,” her pen was flying again. “We’ll have to look into mechanical options if you want to go back to competitive volleyball. I’ll draw up a list of possibilities – " 

The glare of the sun in his eyes made the vast space look faded, washed out, more an impressionist painting than a real place. But under his hand, his left knee was hard metal. His fingers clamped down on it. “Has Oikawa been talking to you again?”

Anzai-sensei wouldn’t look at him this time. Simply said in her studied, transparent way, “Of course not. It’s just – Iwaizumi-kun. I encourage all patients to try and resume as normal a life as possible. For you, that includes volleyball, doesn’t it?" 

She was just doing her job. He should apologise to her, really, for having to answer that idiot’s questions on her own time. He had to keep hold of his temper, at least until he left this room. In as even and controlled a tone as possible, bordering, he hoped, on friendliness, he said, “I was going to quit when I finished high school, anyway.”

Light motes clung close to Anzai-sensei’s hair, her eyelashes. In the unreality of her sun-drenched office, he could see that her eyes were kind. “Something more durable, then. Something for recreational sport. I’ll draw up a list.”

Oikawa was outside, like Hajime should have known he would be. A cap jammed over what must be bus-head, cheeks still red from the cold, sports bag taking up the space between his legs and the coffee table. His thumbs flew, all his attention on the Nintendo DS his parents had bought him for his seventeenth birthday. Beside him, Kaa-san looked up from her magazine, and waved.

It had taken him the entire drive here to convince her he could go in for his appointment on his own.

He couldn’t shout at his mother. He couldn’t get angry at her. So he braced himself on the borrowed crutches instead, and kicked Oikawa hard in the shin with his remaining leg. “What are you doing here, Shittykawa?”

“Ow,” his best friend protested, Nintendo dropping into his lap. “Why are you always asking me that lately, Iwa-chan? If I didn’t know better, I would be hurt!”

Kaa-san’s brief panic, when he had swung his leg like that whilst without his prosthesis, contracted into a harried concern. Her eyes flicked between them. Hajime reined in his desire to move on to the topic he was really interested in, at least in her presence, and said instead, “Shouldn’t you be digging an early grave back in Tokyo?”

“It’s Golden Week, Iwa-chan! Even super-hardworking people like me need a break.”

“Then go home and sleep, Trashkawa." 

Kaa-san’s worry dissipated, was replaced with a smile. She stood up, smoothing the back of her skirt. “I’m going to go and pay now, so play nice, you two. When sensei is done with the adjustments, we can go and eat Tooru-kun’s favourite ramen, all right?”

“You’re the best, Ba-chan!” crowed Oikawa.

Their cheerfulness; it was so brittle, like the shell of an false egg. Push hard enough, and you’d find there was nothing inside. You’d shatter it, and for what?

Hajime dropped into the sofa next to Oikawa, leaned the crutches against the wall. Instead of returning to his Nintendo, his best friend eyed him. If Kaa-san had thought there was something off about him, Oikawa certainly did.

He counted to three, the way they had been taught to do in kindergarten, their soft-hearted teacher’s version of timeout. Did Oikawa still do that? Did it help him? It helped Hajime a little, gave him time to breathe in, out, and say in an even, controlled tone, “You need to stop talking to Anzai-sensei behind my back.”

Oikawa leaned forward. His fingers were interlocked over his knees. He looked at them instead of at Hajime. They weren’t the only ones in this waiting room, the day before Golden Week started for real. An old woman and a teenage boy took up another set of couches, the woman turning the pages of her book with metal fingers, and the boy had propped his shoed prosthesis onto a low table. If either of them had a companion, they were not to be seen. Hajime had fucking two.

“It isn’t behind your back,” Oikawa said. Hajime didn’t know what irritated him more: that Oikawa couldn’t deny what he had been doing, or that he was speaking in that cautious tone again, like Hajime would erupt if he wasn’t careful. 

He always erupted at him. What was there to be afraid of?

Oikawa’s tone made him keenly aware of the thin thread that was now his hold on his temper. He yanked his voice down. “You know why I don’t want a sports prosthesis.”

“Prostheses for recreational sports aren’t as expensive,” his best friend insisted. “You could start with those, and in the future, maybe – ”

“I don’t want to play for recreation.”

When Hajime wanted to jump, when he wanted to go fucking downhill, he had to bend his knee in a particular way, to lock the mechanism in place, or it might spasm or do something else weird. He hated going downstairs more than he hated going upstairs, because even though it wasn’t even that big of possibility, even though all the rehab he had been undergoing was just to prevent this kind of thing, he could see it, how far he might fall. Did Oikawa even understand that?

Did Oikawa even understand how _different_ –

“You’ll be able to play again.” There was a pleading note in his voice. “Don’t you want that? Don’t you – ”

The earnestness. Hajime loathed it. The need for fucking reassurance. He was sick of reassuring other people. He was tired. “I made my decision. Respect it." 

His best friend used to stare at Ushijima across a net with that same expression on his face. A twisted anger bordering on hatred, and yet for a feeling as personal as hate, weirdly directionless. As if it was the world that he railed against; the world personified. “I won’t respect your decision to fucking give up.”

A page turned. Metal feet drummed on a tabletop. Kaa-san’s shoes whispered to a stop on the carpet. “ _Tooru-kun_.”

Oikawa’s gaze dropped. There was an ‘AJ’ emblazoned on his cap, the caps they had all been issued for their graduation trip to Kyoto. It was Hajime’s cap. He’d printed his name in permanent marker just where the front panel met the bill. When the hell had he stolen Hajime’s cap?

Coldness dripped into his lungs.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry, Ba-chan." 

“Tooru-kun – ” Kaa-san hardly ever got mad at Oikawa. He was like the spoiled, younger son she’d wished for, but never had. Her words snapped, elastic bands pulled tight and let go.

Oikawa grabbed his sports bag by its strap, jumped to his feet. “I have to go.” His eyes were still trained on the floor.

The door opened, then. Nakano-san’s calm, measured voice. “Iwaizumi-kun, your prosthesis is ready.”

Behind Oikawa, another door swung shut.

“How could he say that? Of course you aren’t giving up, Hajime, there are limits – " 

Kaa-san hadn’t stopped talking about it since they had left the clinic. All ten minutes down the elevator, and now as she clicked her seatbelt into place, and waited for Hajime to lift his prosthesis into the legspace and shut the door. “ – seatbelt, sweetheart, it’s your decision whether or not you want to continue with volleyball, Tou-san and I support you no matter – ” Checking her mirrors, and setting the car into reverse gave her pause.

Thank fuck, for whatever reason, maybe because she was running out of steam, maybe because the pause introduced some hesitation into her train of thought, she didn’t finish the sentence. Didn’t speak at all, until they were out of the parking lot and in the blinding afternoon sun. 

Dead sakura still littered the pavements on either side of them. In Tokyo, the sakura season had ended weeks ago, but in Sendai, where winter lingered longer, they had been in full blossom just days before. Kaa-san’s fingers flexed on the wheel. A lone petal drifted onto their windscreen, and stuck there.

The cap. He remembered a windy day at some temple, on a tiny bridge over a stream, and his best friend’s hair flattened beneath the cap, the edges damp and sticky with sweat. Oikawa had been laughing.

Why couldn’t the idiot have worn his own? They had been told to keep them on at all times. Why did he have to have Hajime’s?

“Sweetheart.” He was forced back into the car, the huff of the air-conditioner between him and Kaa-san. “Are you and Tooru-kun all right? I think – it feels like the two are you are fighting.”

It was bloody ungrateful, how often he found himself irritated with his mother. “We’re not fighting.”

“Are you angry with him, then?”

“Why is it my fault?”

She sighed. “That’s not what I meant.”

But she didn’t tell him what she did mean. And when Hajime switched on the radio, turned up the volume so that Utada Hikaru’s voice crept into the very corners of the car, and pushed against the closed windows, she didn’t object.

He wasn’t angry with Oikawa.

Lying on his bed in the dark, trying to ignore the ache in his non-existent right toe, he admitted that okay, he was. But he was always mad at Oikawa about something. The idiot was going to give him high blood pressure for sure by the time they were thirty. What was new about that? 

He turned onto his front, and immediately regretted it. Phantom pain didn’t seem to have any rhyme or reason, so maybe it had nothing to do with it, but the ache in his non-existent toe had graduated to a sharp pain, like someone had clamped it in a vice and was squeezing. Squeezing. He buried his head in his pillow. The tramadol. It was useless.

Exhaustion ate at the edges of his mind, chewed at it. But he couldn’t sleep.

Lifting his head, he squinted at the clock. Three a.m. In three hours, he was supposed to get up and go to the market with Kaa-san. An apology for how shitty he had been acting since he came home. 

The pain in his toe seemed to crack, shoot down into his foot. His toe felt broken. It felt fucking broken. He bit down on his pillow, the cotton turning damp and slippery between his teeth. And then he seized his phone from the bedside table and pressed speed-dial.

Oikawa picked up on the sixth ring. He sounded out of breath. “Iwa-chan?”

“What the hell are you doing?”

A breath. Another breath. Too quick and erratic. A swallow, and then, “Oh, nothing.”

“I’m going to kill Kunimi.”

“Don’t be mean, Iwa-chan. He could hardly have said no to his senpai.”

He didn’t have a leg to move, but every muscle in his shoulders was tense, still. He was afraid to move, to worsen the pain, and the frustration at this, the frustration at Oikawa, who never grew up, who never changed – “Do you want to hurt your knee again, you shithead? Do you want to stop playing volleyball?" 

Oikawa didn’t speak for a moment. When he did, his breathing was back to normal. “Don’t you have some ibuprofen in your room, Iwa-chan? Take some.”

He shut his eyes. 

“You used it up. Okay.” Oikawa’s voice grew fuzzy, as if his mouth was further away from the speaker than it should be. There was shuffling. The squeak of shoes on a court, as familiar to Hajime as the fall of moonlight over the desk in his room, the crunchy give of his mother’s onigiri beneath his teeth. “Stay right there. I’ll get some from the kitchen on my way up.”

“Oikawa,” he said.

“It’s okay, Iwa-chan.” Bright and cheery, like it was three in the afternoon, and not three hours until dawn.

“It’s not okay. I shouldn’t – ”

Soft. “It’s okay. I’ll get there faster if I’m not on the phone.”

The beep was long, and flat. Hajime drove his head into his pillow, bit down on his tongue, hard. It took his mind off his non-existent leg for a total of ten seconds. 

Years of practice kept Oikawa quiet. Only Hajime would have heard the whisper of slippers on the wooden flooring, the creak as his bedroom door opened, the click when it closed. One hundred and eighty four centimetres of idiot plopped onto the floor beside his bed, bottle in one hand, pills in the other, and a ridiculous grin on his face.

Hajime took them, downed them, and then stuck his face back into his pillow, and prayed for a quick release. 

The bottle clacked on his bedside table. The mattress dipped, the weight and warmth of his best friend hovered over him, and then Oikawa tumbled onto the side of the bed closest to the wall, tucked into himself so as to not disturb Hajime’s splayed form. Hajime’s blanket inched off him.

“Oi.”

“You have to share, Iwa-chan. I expected better of you.”

He shoved a hand into Oikawa’s face. Laughter, warm and damp, burst against his palm. 

They were both quiet. As the pain receded, the darkness in Hajime’s room seemed to expand, to creep back into the places that it had been forced to vacate. The green numbers on the digital clock morphed at regular intervals, silently efficient. Sleep hovered over him like a cloak.

“Iwa-chan,” said Oikawa. Still quiet. “I really am sorry.”

He grunted. And then mumbled, “I’m sorry too.”

But Oikawa wasn’t done. “I just.” He stopped. His arm, pressed up against Hajime’s, was cold and sticky with sweat. Usually, Hajime would have shoved him off and ordered him to take a shower. But he was too tired. The human warmth was comforting. Turning his head, he found himself staring at the profile of Oikawa’s face in the dark. The shadow of his hair, sticking to his face in clumps, and the sharp tip of his nose.

Hajime said, “I want things to be normal.”

His best friend sucked in a breath.

“I know,” Hajime's voice was thicker than it needed to be. He almost stopped speaking, it was so bloody embarassing, but there was something about confession, about peeling yourself raw, that made it impossible to stop. “I know things can’t go back to how they were, but I – want to be normal. I want to not – to not have to fight anymore.”

Oikawa’s hand found his. Squeezed. Hajime felt as if his head was in a fog. The ibuprofen, mixing with the tramadol already in his system. He wasn’t going to be so sleepy tomorrow. 

Sometime later, he heard himself say, “Where did my cap go?”

“Idiot,” Oikawa said, just as drowsily. “It’s my cap. You gave it to me. No take-backs.”

“Why would I…”

Their last night in Kyoto, he had woken up to find Oikawa’s futon empty, and his friend sitting in the dim-lit, ratty space that passed for a hotel lobby, face ghost-like in the glow of the vending machine. When he had turned to face Hajime, the apologetic character of the fear on his face; it had been so annoyingly Oikawa.

“Iwa-chan,” he had said. “You’ll come visit me at Tsukuba, won’t you?”

Hajime had smacked him over the head, and said, “Stop being stupid and go to bed, Shittykawa.”

The next day, when their entire year was crowded into the hotel’s tiny dining area, eating a poor excuse of a continental breakfast, he had come down to find Oikawa and Hanamaki already seated, the first chattering away to the stone-faced, long-suffering second, and he had jammed his cap onto the idiot’s head. “Wear that for me.”

“Iwa-chan,” his best friend had wailed. “That’s not how it _works_.”

He had never taken it back. 

Fuck if he knew, even now, two years later, what that was supposed to mean.


	4. Chapter 4

He’d just forgotten what it was like, Tooru decided, to have annoying opponents. There were no geniuses on the university circuit; either they had turned pro straight out of high school, like Ushiwaka-chan, or they were still in high school, like Tobio-chan. Without some embodiment of his antithesis shadowing his footsteps, he had grown complacent. There was nothing to fire his blood. 

So on the day after he had gatecrashed Iwa-chan's date, having left Iwa-chan drooling onto his pillow, and having peeled the last, cold slice of pizza off the oily base of its box, Tooru boarded the train back to Tsukuba, dropped his bag in his room, showered, and then hair still dripping onto his old Astro Boy T-shirt, he opened his laptop and typed Tobio-chan’s name into the search engine. 

It wasn’t that Tooru didn’t watch pro volleyball. Like every other volleyball junkie, he followed the major championships avidly. It was just that the videos he watched over and over again, breaking down each side’s every move, were those of his immediate opponents: other university teams. So he knew Yaku Morisuke from Keio’s stats like the backs of his eyelids when he woke up in the morning; he could have pictured the curve of Tanaka Jun from Nippon Science University’s jump float serve over the net; he had identified the weaknesses of every setter and reserve setter in Tokyo. 

And so, while he had an idea of how much Ushiwaka – the bastard – had improved over the years, he hadn’t seen Tobio-chan on a court since that match in third year, much less peeled him apart over a screen. The results were chilling. 

Thirty minutes into Karasuno’s second-year Nationals victory, Tooru paused the game. Tugged his headphones off, let them rest on his shoulders. It had barely been dawn when he left Iwa-chan’s room; now the sun had climbed high enough to shine directly into his room through the window grill. His hair was dry, but his shirt was wet, and the weight of his headphones pressed the dampness into his skin. 

A shadow passed over the sun, threw the room into gloom. His fingers, interlocked over the space between his legs, clenched. Slowly, he reached again for the keyboard. Hesitated. And then, once more, pressed play. 

“Oikawa!”’

The slamming open of the gym doors clanged in the vast, high-ceilinged space. Vibrated through Tooru’s acid-fueled mind. He hesitated, blindsided by the noise and the sweat dripping into his eyes, and the ball he had thrown up into the air descended once again, bounced on the floor a few times before knocking into the wall. 

Yacchan, incongruous with the setting in his jeans, white dress shirt, and backpack, stood at the entrance with his hands on his hips. “This is the third day in a row you’ve skived, you bastard!”

It took him a moment to respond. To unlock himself from volleyball, the empty, echoing chamber that had become his mind in the past seven hours, turn inside out and face Yacchan like a normal human being. He scrubbed a hand through his sweat-damp hair, grinned. “Sorry! I just had to get this right.”

His friend’s forehead creased. His short, Makki-like hair seemed to suck in a breath at the same time as its owner, and then wilted when he exhaled, explosively. “I can’t keep marking attendance for you. Seriously. You’re going to fail, Oikawa, even you can fail, you know that, right?”

He had stood still for too long. His knee was objecting to the sudden cease in activity by squeezing in on itself. Squeeze, release. Squeeze, release. He started on his cooling down routine. “Don’t be like that, Yacchan. It’s only until Golden Week.”

“The tournament isn’t over for another month! We’ll be in mid-terms by then – ” Yacchan paused, absorbed what he had said. “Golden Week? What’s happening in Golden Week?”

“Nothing,” he laughed. The toxicity of his own voice burned at the forefront of his mind. “Not something for you to worry about, Yacchan.”

Sharp. “Should I tell Iwaizumi about it, then?”

This was even funnier. But Yacchan didn’t share his humour. Tooru felt more certain of himself than he had for a long time, and Yacchan was pouting at him, a habit from his coddled childhood that he’d confessed to Tooru he despised, and which, on an adult face, was strangely sad. Tooru felt sorry for him. 

He softened his tone. “It’s not something for Iwa-chan to worry about, either. I’m just going to meet an old…rival.”

“Rival? This isn’t a shonen manga.”

Sitting down on the floor, Tooru started on his toe touches. “Sure it is. I’m not the protagonist though.”

His friend’s shoulders hunched. As if he were torn between taking a calming breath, and just letting rip. “Oikawa,” he said, voice taut. “What’s wrong with you? You’ve been acting really weird. It’s not like – ”

“This is like me.” He didn’t know. He hadn’t been there when – the lights of the gym clashed with the evening glow; stark, unchanging white interrupted by gold, turning into a fitful pattern at the edges of the floor. Tooru lifted his head, looked Yacchan in the eye. “This is me.”

With that truth and other things that were less obvious, less black-and-white – Iwa-chan’s expression, Ba-chan’s anger – locked away in the back of his mind, Tooru had found himself standing in an aluminium-roofed corridor, staring at a set of metal doors. He had really been planning to come tomorrow. Five and a half hours on the train was not the best way to start off the match of your life. Then again, what did one day matter? 

The squeak of shoes, the thud of volleyballs, boys’ voices broken and unbroken, and the musty smell of decades of dust and dried sweat. His hand was loose on the strap of his sports bag. Despite himself, he smiled. “Ah,” he said, to the closed doors and the afternoon sun, slanting into the corridor and drawing out the shadows of the thin columns. “Iwa-chan should be here.”

And then he took one step, another, and the metal door creaked open at his touch.

“Boke!”

A volleyball bounced off a shock of orange hair, which yelped, and shot straight at Tooru’s face. It hit his palms instead, with bruising force. When the ball dropped away, he found himself staring across nothing but open space, at Kageyama Tobio. 

This time, when he smiled, he could feel the icicles forming beneath his skin.

Tobio-chan had grown. He knew this from the videos and stats, but seeing it was different. Standing opposite the boy with just a net between them, and having to look up to meet his eyes. Realising that the scowl on his face, the crease between his eyebrows that betrayed a perpetual awkwardness, had mellowed somewhat. 

At seventeen, Tobio-chan was settling into himself, and Tooru, who knew exactly how much of a shitty person he was, begrudged him this. “Do you think,” he said to Tobio in his nastiest voice. “That I can set better for your teammates than you can?”

His ex-junior blinked rapidly, and then his jaw set. “No, Oikawa-san. I don’t.”

A laugh burst out of him. Some things didn’t change. Everything else might, but some things just didn’t change. Behind him, a midget first-year with a persistent stammer launched the ball into the air. 

Hours later, evening burning gold and still in the silence of the gym, Tooru sat on the low stage, one leg hanging off the edge, the other drawn up towards him. He unstrapped his knee supporter, touched the swollen joint. Hissed. But the tears that threatened at the corners of his eyes had nothing to do with the pain. 

Coach Irihata, the plump old man, would be so disappointed. 

The end was not yet in sight, was it? The cards hadn’t fallen. And yet, here Tooru was. Here he was. 

“Oikawa-san.” A pack of ice dangled in front of his face. 

He snatched it, grinned up at Tobio-chan, who eyed him as if he could bite his head off. If only. He would not cry in front of Tobio-chan. He wouldn’t sink that last inch into pitiableness. “Chibi-chan’s gone home, then?”

The boy sat down beside him. Looked at Tooru’s knee. Frowned. As if the words to his question were like poop, and would come leaking out if he concentrated hard enough. Tooru wasn’t inclined to help him.

Finally, Tobio-chan said, “Iwasaki hesitates when the ball gets too close to the net.”

Was the idiot really incapable of talking about anything other than volleyball?

“I saw,” said idiot explained. “After the first time, you always set the ball farther away from the net.” And then he ducked his head. Mumbled something. 

“What?”

Tobio-chan's head shot up. Eyes burning with ridiculous determination. “I didn’t notice that myself.” And then his face flushed tomato red. “You really are amazing, Oikawa-san.”

This bitterness. Was this really all he could feel, when it came to volleyball? Was this all that there had been? He didn’t believe it. That wasn’t how he remembered it. This bitterness. He wanted to choke Tobio with his bare hands. 

“I lost,” he said. “You’ve surpassed me. You did, a long time ago.”

The idiot had the gall to look surprised. “Karasuno is my team.”

“Maybe,” he said. He wasn’t sure, to what. The ice on his knee was a relief. “Maybe. It’s okay, though. I guess it’s okay.”

The confusion was as clear as glass on Tobio-chan’s face. And suddenly, Tooru wasn’t angry anymore. Just sad. A bone-deep resignation. He recognised that, just as he had not understood when a middle schooler with stars in his eyes and more talent than sense, when fifteen years old and lost, uncomprehending – Tobio-chan did not understand now. He didn’t even sense it. 

It was enough to make a person to feel petty.

Because, Iwa-chan grumbled in his head. You are. 

He pushed the ice pack at Tobio-chan, who caught it so clumsily it was difficult to believe he was a setter at all. And stood up, scooping his supporter from the floor. “Well. It sucked, seeing your ugly face again, Tobio-chan, so the pleasure’s all yours. I suppose you’ll be in Tokyo for nationals.” He sneered. “Don’t come within ten miles of me.”

Turning around, he reached for his sports bag, and Iwa-chan’s cap, perched on top. 

“Oikawa-san!”

The volume of the shout fired up his spine. “What?”

Tobio-chan, sat still on the stage, was scowling up at him. “I – I – ” The rest of it poured out in a rush. “I’m going to Nippon Science University next year. I’ve decided.”

Tooru felt his eyebrows climb. “Oh? With your grades.”

Really. Bullying the kid was just too easy. 

When Tobio’s embarassment had receded enough for him to speak again, he said, “I – I’m looking forward to – the next time, I’ll beat you for real, Oikawa-san. Your team against mine.”

In any other world, in a shonen manga, this would have been it. What Tooru needed. The continuity of a rivalry. The promise of a future, further strife, a possibility of winning. If you’re going to hit it, his motto had run since middle school, hit it until it breaks. This was what Tooru had come to Karasuno for.

His mind was blank. “Why.”

Confusion fit over Tobio’s face again. 

“Why don’t you just go pro. You’ve received offers.”

“How did you know – ”

“It’s obvious.”

He hadn’t wanted it to end like this. Snarling like this, a wounded dog. 

What was ending? He was still playing volleyball, Tobio was still playing volleyball, whether at university or on the club circuits or on the national team, they would meet again, they would do this again –

“It’s too early.”

“What the hell does that mean!”

The dying sunlight was caught in this place. Rectangular and high-ceilinged, like any gym, like every other place Tooru had spent more time in than in his own home. The embers of the day burned within these four wooden walls as if they would never go out.

“Tobio-chan.” His tone was like a slug. “Don’t tell me you’re afraid.”

“I’m not.” But the idiot couldn’t meet his eyes. “I’m not good enough, yet. I need to get better. I need to – ”

“You can get better playing against other professional players. You will get better playing against other professional players.”

“Then – then – ” Why was Tobio-chan even trying to argue, he could barely participate in an ordinary conversation. And now he was yelling. “Then! I am! I am afraid.”

They stared at each other. Tooru had the uncomfortable, repugnant feeling that Tobio-chan had just confessed something to him that he had never so much as hinted to another soul. The speed with which the boy dropped his eyes, more like a coin zooming down from a hundred stories up than a human being, just confirmed this.

His knee still ached. He resisted the urge to sit down again – hell if he was going to stay here any longer than completely necesssary – and said, neglecting to keep the distaste out of his voice: “What exactly are you afraid of? Tobio-chan.”

“Dying penniless in a gutter.”

How uncharacteristically imaginative. 

“That’s what Kaa-san says.”

The world made sense again. 

“Well,” Tooru relented. Fuck, but he hated backtracking. “Degrees are good fallbacks.”

Tobio-chan peered up at him. Disappointment in the knit of his eyebrows. What? Had he expected Tooru to overturn his mother’s reasoning, his own reasoning, and tell him to just go for it? “That’s not what you said before.”

Damn the idiot and his stupid memory. Tooru let his lip curl into a sneer. “What I’d do isn’t what you should do, Tobio-chan. Get it right.”

His ex-junior actually contemplated this, as if Tooru’s attempt to heap the blame for his own outburst on him would make sense, if considered from all the angles his Neanderthal brain could manage. 

Abruptly, Tooru had had enough. Of all the things he hated most, it was when Tobio-chan turned human. He swiped his sports bag from the floor. Iwa-chan’s cap tumbled into its open depths. Seijou. He hadn’t been back for a long time. Well. Looked like his next stop was going to be Kunimi-chan. 

“Oikawa-san?”

He stuck his tongue out. There was nothing else to say. 

Early the next morning, his knee on fire again, a throbbing heat that was nowhere near as comforting as Hajime’s fingers in his, he thought, it was okay. Maybe it was okay. 

Tobio-chan had the right idea, really. They weren’t kids, anymore. They shouldn’t be stupid enough to believe the drivel they were fed in school, the things adults said when everything was far away and unreal and none of it really mattered: that there was nothing beyond their reach. There was nothing they couldn’t overcome.

If he never defeated Ushiwaka, never beat Tobio, what did it matter?

He just needed to get a contract.

That night, Iwa-chan asked him, “Where did my cap go?”

“Idiot,” he said, keeping his voice low and quiet, half-consciously mimicking his best friend’s sleepy rhythm. “It’s my cap. You gave it to me. No take-backs.”

“Why would I…” Iwa-chan didn’t finish the question. 

Tooru squeezed his hand again. Held on tightly. Too tightly. Turning onto his side, he studied Iwa-chan’s face. The high forehead, the sharp jaw, the mouth that was not smiling, nor frowning, nor flat, but simply nothing with the neutrality of sleep. 

How many times had he dropped off to that face, woken to it in the morning, in the lazy summer afternoons when a nap was the only escape from the heat?

When he had sat beside Iwa-chan’s bed in the hospital, waking for him to open his eyes, how jarringly similar had he looked?

“No take-backs,” he repeated. There were no take-backs.

His phone vibrated in his pocket. Careful not to disturb Iwa-chan, he slid it out, checked the screen. The glare made him squint. A text from Tobio-chan?

Oikawa-san. You should take better care of your knee. 

He had to press the phone hard against his mouth to stop himself from laughing out loud. Over nine hours, just to say that. 

Some things didn’t change.


	5. Chapter 5

The Hiyoshi Commemorative Hall had been built in 1958, and looked it. The gym’s multipurpose hall was polished to shining, and the lines had probably been repainted not that long ago, but the series of small windows stacked on top of each other like an enormous solar panel were reluctant to let in the sun. Only the spotlights directly above the court had been switched on, plunging the upper gallery into gloom.

It made sense. The bleachers on the floor of the court itself were not so packed that anybody had been forced to shuffle upstairs. It saved electricity. Hajime shouldn’t blame the gym, and the windows, and the lighting operator for his bad mood.

It was just Oikawa. Oikawa, who was the root of all his problems. 

“No way.” Even over the phone, the darkness in Oikawa’s voice was like stainless steel. “Don’t you dare come.”

Distance sucked, sometimes. Like when you wanted to throttle your best friend. “Why the hell not?”

“It’ll be weird! Voyeur-ish. Do you want to be a voyeur, Iwa-chan?”

“How is that – you’re going to be playing in fucking Keio. On my campus. I’m coming."

“There’s no point. I won’t be playing. Takano-kun is – ”

“I’m there to watch volleyball, not you, Shittykawa!”

He had expected Oikawa to whine. Or to yell at him. Instead, he said, “Fine.” And then there was a click, and Hajime was left listening to a long, long beep.

When he got his hands on that shitty idiot –

“The game is starting late, isn’t it?”

Akaike was holding a can of Coke in her outstretched hand. He forced a smile, let it turn more genuine as his mind veered away from his best friend to the present. There was no point in making Akaike suffer because of certain bastards who couldn’t discuss things like adults.  

But as he accepted the can, and she smoothed her skirt with her now free hand, sat down next to him, he found that the unease wouldn’t go away. It did have something to do with Akaike; who caught him looking at her, and smiled, and deepened the discomfort at the back of his head.

He hadn’t been planning to ask her to come with him. It was a pretty obvious excuse for a date, and yet. Akaike herself had suggested that they watch it together. She’d seen him staring at a poster of the match, which was between Tsukuba University and Nippon Science, and inferred that Oikawa would be playing. Her memory was scary that way.

Hajime had said yes. What else would he have said?

But he found himself gripping the can a little too hard.

“Iwaizumi-san,” Akaike said. “A lot of your friends play volleyball, don’t they?” She ticked them off on her fingers. “Yaku-san, Oikawa-san, Kurata-san. The…Hanamaki-san who came to visit the other day. Is that all of them?”

It was sobering, to realise that by now, she’d met most of his friends. He flicked the tab of the Coke up, took a gulp. The Keio team was filing out of their side of the gym. Yaku, glancing up and seeing the two of them, flashed a thumbs up. 

Akaike waved back. Her voice was bright in that way that, on Oikawa, Hajime would have known instantly meant that he was about to be asked something deliberate in the most casual of tones. But she wasn’t Oikawa. He didn’t know her like that. And he should respect that, and focus on what she was saying.  

“Did you play volleyball, Iwaizumi-san?”

The muscles in his wrist stood out. Condensation wet his palm. On the court, Yaku shouted at one of his juniors to stop taking the mickey and for gods’ sake, warm up properly. Akaike’s eyes seemed to retire into their sockets. “I’m sorry, I – ”

“Yeah,” he said. “I did.” 

Tsukuba’s team wasn’t appearing.

Akaike’s silence reminded him of Baa-san’s hedgehog, when something scared it and it curled up into a defensive ball. Prickly and nervous.

“It’s too expensive,” he said. “And it feels – different, I guess. There are people who still play even – after, and there’s this thing they do at the Paralympics called sitting volleyball, but – " 

She waved her hands. “You don’t have to explain to me, Iwaizumi-san.”

“I’m not,” he said. But he felt like he needed to make her understand. She would understand. She wasn’t Oikawa, who didn’t know what it was to give up. Who couldn’t.

After that last match against Karasuno, when they’d played themselves to exhaustion in Seijou’s echoing gym, and then all burst into tears because Oikawa refused to be prevented from making an emotional speech; when every nerve had been raw and hurting, he’d said something to Oikawa he maybe shouldn’t have said.

They were walking home, the same winding path up a hill, following the line of the stone wall that Oikawa had insisted on climbing onto when ten and convinced he wasn’t scared of heights; that Hajime drew ugly faces on when nine and inseparable from his new box of chalks. All the conversations, all the fights, the stories, the jokes, they seemed to crowd in on Hajime then, ghosts, suffocating.

“Even when you’ve become an old man,” he’d said. “You probably won’t be happy.”

“Even if you won one tournament,” he’d said. “It won’t be enough.”

Because, Oikawa wouldn’t stop. That would always be something else, something more. The spotlights gazed dully upon Hajime and Akaike, seated in the midst of sparsely populated benches, on a floor four times their age. “I’m not explaining,” he said. “I’m just saying, it’s better. To make a clean break. It would feel too different. You know?”

He didn’t remember Oikawa’s answer.

“Yes,” said Akaike. “It’s really all right, Iwaizumi-san. Oh, look. They are out.” Too quickly, she turned back to the court.

If Keio had filed in with relative discipline, tense with anticipation, Tsukuba’s team was stiff. Agitated. A girl who must have been the manager started to lift balls from the trolley, toss them to the players, who spiked them over the net. The spikes were clean, effective, as one would expect from a team that had once won the All Japan Intercollegiate Volleyball Championship five times in a row.

But those who’d run round back to the back moved restlessly. There was no talk, no good-natured ribbing. No one so much as smiled. And.

“How strange,” Akaike said. “I don’t see Oikawa-san.”

There he was. Walking in with a grizzled, old man with a whistle slung around his neck and a clipboard in hand. They were speaking, but it was damn obvious that Hajime wasn’t going to hear anything from over here. Oikawa turned, and – was that fucking blood on his arm? His eyes caught Hajime’s. And then flicked to the side. To Akaike. A breath too long, and then he smirked.

Hajime could feel his eyebrows crushing together.

An ‘okay’ sign. And then Oikawa joined his teammates in their warm-up.

“I wonder if something happened.”

Hajime didn’t trust himself to answer civilly. So he didn’t. 

Oikawa had said a first-year called Takano Hiro had replaced him as the official setter. A mouse of a boy with a voice like a grandpa’s you’d get along with him Iwa-chan, had been his words. But it was Oikawa who took first serve. One of his teammates – Yamamoto – beckoned for his attention, pointed at the stripe of blood on his arm. The idiot smiled, tightly, and then more soothingly, and wiped it off on his bright blue shorts. Fucking idiot.

The ball went up into the air.

It had been nine months since he watched Oikawa serve. But he could tell from the glass-like calm on his best friend’s face: it had been a perfect toss. And then Oikawa was slamming the ball across the net. It seemed to flatten on the edge of the court, the very edge.

Hajime found that he’d stopped breathing. No one – it was impossible –

But Yaku was there, sending the ball up into the air. It was a poor receive. The libero was already shouting an apology as the setter scrambled to connect. Kurata sent the ball into the air, Tanaka spiked it. Tsukuba’s team was only sluggishly moving into place – what the hell was up with them? Someone was shouting – the captain, Oikawa had said he had a goatee, a _goatee_ , Iwa-chan – and the players seemed to rally. The libero pushed a chance ball up into the air.

Oikawa was at the net. Hands poised to receive the ball.

The image struck Hajime. The familiarity of it.

He was back on that path. He was back on that hill. A stone wall wound its way past, pebbles clacked and scattered beneath worn shoes, the breeze that swept past carried the first dead leaves of the year. He hadn’t been cruel. What he said had been a truth. A promise.

Tilting his head up to the evening sky, he’d said, “It won’t be enough; playing volleyball for a lifetime.”

Oikawa’s answer. He didn’t remember. It wasn’t important. It wasn’t the point.

A lifetime. That was fucking long.

“Iwaizumi-san?”

He was standing.

“Iwaizumi-san." 

“Sorry,” he said.

On the court, Oikawa called, “Yacchan!”

Step. Swing. Step. Swing. All the way up to the doors.

He told Akaike that she could leave. She didn’t. They sat together on a bench in the corridor where the guest locker rooms were. She talked, and he tried to respond. She was being nothing but supportive, concerned. But he wanted to be alone. He needed to think. To put his thoughts together, or at least, shove them all away.

Why had he come to watch the match? 

Oikawa hadn’t told him about it. Hajime hadn’t asked. 

One of those things they’d just agreed silently not to bring up. Like when they’d accidentally walked in on Youko-san and her boyfriend, and were scarred for life.

It’d just seemed stupid, really, to pretend he didn’t know that Oikawa’s team would be playing in Keio, when the posters were fucking everywhere.

And maybe, it’d been his best friend’s voice in his head, accusing him of giving up.

It wasn’t Oikawa’s bloody business, if he wanted to – if he didn’t –

It wasn’t Oikawa’s bloody right to judge him. 

The doors to the court clanged open. Akaike stopped speaking. Bright blue uniforms thronged the narrow, grey corridor. Their voices were loud, bright. They reflected off the gloomy walls, bounced back from the low, fluorescent-lighted ceiling. It looked like he was going to be comfort eating with Yaku in the evening. 

His best friend was one of the last through. Walking uncharacteristically slowly. Unsmiling. When his irritation sparked this time, Hajime had the ugly feeling he knew why. The unease at the back of his head coalesced, thick and solid as a lump of plasticine.

“Oi.”

No one heard him.

“Trashkawa!”

A brief, imperfect lull. Only three people turned to stare at him. Oikawa, Yamamato, and the captain. The edge of Oikawa’s mouth turned sharp. With one hand, he slid something thin and white into his pocket. The fingers of the other, he fluttered at Yamamoto. A dismissal. “Iwa-chan. And – Akaike-san, am I right?”

Akaike bowed her head. “It’s nice to meet you again – ”

“What was that about?”

The two of them were looking at him. Yamamoto, further back. Feet turned towards the locker room, head turned back. Their silence teetered on a precipice. It was Oikawa who spoke. “What was what about?”

“The blood." 

“Oh. That.” Yamamoto decided to escape. Oikawa’s voice was airy. “There was an accident with Takano-kun. Afraid I can’t tell you the details.”

“Why not?”

His best friend’s foot tapped. A tic.

“You can say it in front of Akaike-san. She’ll keep quiet.”

That glance could have cut steel. “Is that so?”

Hajime reached down, took her hand. Her fingers were cool, smooth. Stubby. Her uncut nails dug into his skin. They felt nothing like Oikawa’s. Whose eyes lingered on their intertwined hands, before sliding up to meet Hajime’s.

In that second, Hajime knew. His denial. His suspicion. It all burned away.

There was only one window in this hallway, at the very end. Looking out on a white, blind sky.

Oikawa’s hand was on his hip. His fingers, strong and defined from years of volleyball, topped by perfectly maintained nails, tapped on his stained shorts. The edges of his hair clung to his face, damp with sweat. “How sweet,” he said. “But it’s not anything to do with Akaike-san. Really. It’s not my story to tell, that’s all.” Tap. Tap. “I’ll see you later then, Iwa-chan.”

The door to the locker room creaked behind him. Then was pulled properly shut.

Akaike-san’s hand was tense in his. Awkward. He let go. “Sorry.”

“Oh,” she said. A little too highly. “Don’t be. I – I don’t mind." 

But he didn’t take her hand, and she didn’t seek his again. He walked her to her dorm. Oikawa was nowhere to be seen. He wasn’t sure why he’d thought he would be. It wasn’t as if his best friend would even have known to leave the campus, and walk in this direction. Why would he?

He wasn’t at Hajime’s dorm, either.

When Hajime’s phone rang, it was Yaku, inviting him over to eat ice-cream and marathon _Shingeki no Kyojin_.

The flat was stuffed with red jerseys, shower-wet hair and shower-flushed skin, and various expressions of disappointment, from forcedly cheerful to the stuffing of faces into cushions to Yaku, practically handing out Giant Caplico cones to all and sundry. People screamed, blood splattered, and at one remove, in Yaku’s closet of a kitchen, Hajime sat on the counter, and said, “I’m mad at Oikawa.”

Yaku braced his arms against his sink. He didn’t look surprised. He didn’t say the obvious: aren’t you always?

When Hajime had woken up in the hospital, he hadn’t understood what happened straight away. He had been so off his face on the anaesthetic that he hadn’t even been sure where he was. Seeing Tooru asleep next to him, stupid face squashed over his arms, drooling out of his open mouth, wasn’t much help.

He’d been thinking – what idiot has such long eyelashes, when Oikawa shut his mouth suddenly, squeezed his eyes shut tighter, and then opened them. Stared unseeingly at Hajime for a moment. Blinked recognition, and a strange, growing alarm. His back became ramrod straight. “Iwa-chan!”

Hajime’s throat was dry. His lips were parched. He licked them. “Shut up, Shittykawa.”

Instead of retaliating, his best friend’s shoulders hunched.

It reminded Hajime, hazily, of _I love you_.

 _I love you_ and –

Oikawa’s face was screwed up. Puffy, Hajime saw now. As if he had been crying. And the hands that gripped the plastic stool he was sitting on; one of them was bandaged. His skin was a sickly colour.  

“Iwa-chan,” he’d choked. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“What the hell for?” Even though he hadn’t understood, he hadn’t known. He just wanted Oikawa not to cry. Not to look like that. He was getting angry, about as much as he could when he still felt like he was treading on clouds. Oikawa’s shoulders were shaking, he’d dropped his gaze, and Hajime wanted to murder him. “Don’t be sorry. Don’t be sorry, you hear me?” 

The sliding door between the kitchen and the main room was open. Darkness perched on the metal sill.

“When they told me there was no other choice, I thought, you know, better me than him. It wasn’t the pain or the other annoying shit, cos’ Oikawa’s stronger than you’d think. He could take it, probably better than me.”

The tap leaked. Water dripped into the grey, steel basin. The gravity of it, of Yaku not speaking, weighed on him.

“Volleyball,” Hajime said. “Is everything to him. So I thought.” His throat constricted. He fought past it. “The thing is, it wasn’t his fault. He didn’t ask me to. It was me. Me.”

“It doesn’t have to be either-or,” said Yaku. Finally. “You can be happy it didn’t happen to Oikawa, and still – ”

“But I blame him.”

How small, and dim, and cold it was, in this room. Hajime’s eyes felt heavy. He dug his heels into them, looking for dust that wasn’t there, and when he was done, the space around him was exactly as he had left it.

He had thought, somehow, that telling somebody, Yaku, that saying it out loud – would change something.

“Yaku,” he said. “What the fuck do I do?”


	6. Chapter 6

“All _right_ , that’s enough.”

Thin fingers plucked the _sake_ out of his hand, set it down on the long, low table. Kajiwara’s and Iwata’s surprisingly melodious duet felt like rainbow-coloured water pouring into one ear and out the other. It made it difficult to remember where he was, perched at the edge of a U-shaped couch in the dark of a karaoke room, staring at empty glasses and ripped peanut packets; much less follow what Yacchan was shouting into his ear. 

What was it people always said? If you thought about not thinking about an elephant in a room, you were going to think about it. 

Iwa-chan kept grabbing that girl’s hand in his head.

You’d have thought he’d be sick of it by now. The same two-second GIF playing over and over again.

With some effort, he made himself turn, look Yacchan in the face. Maybe that way, he’d actually pay attention. 

“ – What was that, then?” his friend was saying. Shouting over the noise. “That card. The one that guy gave you." 

He should be happy for Iwa-chan. Finding a girl who didn’t mind his general boorishness, and stupid frowning face. He should be happy, right? But he wanted to march back to Keio, bang on Iwa-chan’s door, and punch him in the face. As if, somehow, this was Iwa-chan’s fault. As if he could blame him for – what?

What was he blaming Iwa-chan for?

Iwa-chan hadn’t asked him to – It was him. Him.

“Oikawa, are you even listening to me?”

With a huff, Yacchan tackled him. Somehow, between a headlock and a foot in the soft part beneath his ribs – “Ow!” – he managed to dig his hand into Tooru’s jersey pocket. Surfaced with the card in his hand. Oh, Tooru thought blankly. So that was what he’d been looking for.

Yacchan squinted at the print in the darkness. Pushed Tooru’s head out of the way so that he could get some light from the enormous TV screen, across which some pop band pranced, crooning a terribly flat, candy-sweet song.

The glee in his friend’s voice was alien. Distant, like seeing the reflection of a high-flying bird in a stream of rainbow-coloured water. “Shit, Oikawa, this is FC Tokyo!”

Not everyone heard. It was too loud for that. But the nearest conversations broke off; heads turned. Their expressions were easy to read, in the flickering shadow-play of the TV screen, Kajiwara’s and Iwata’s enthusiastic swaying back and forth. Surprise. Delight. Masked envy. Resentment. Anger. At themselves. At him.

“You’re going to go and meet him, right?” Yacchan was asking. “When?”

“Don’t they train at the Tokyo Gas Gymnasium?” Sakurai shouted over the din. “Used to play there when I was a kid, man.”

“FC Tokyo,” Asano said. “Do they even have anyone on the national team. They, like, won two matches out of twenty-one last year.”

Sakurai punched him in the shoulder.

The room was spinning a little. Rotating clockwise from ceiling to floor very, very slowly, as if it were the ocean tide, creeping up a beach and then slipping away, stripping off a layer of sand as it went. A layer of sanity. 

Tooru stood up.

“Oikawa?”

“Washroom,” he might have said.

The corridor outside was bright, and still. The back of his head banged against the wall. His eyes rolled to the ceiling, squeezed shut at the brightness of the lights. Fuck. He was getting morose. Iwa-chan always said he was a sad drunk. 

Iwa-chan didn’t really drink anymore. It was a pain enough getting himself showered, into bed, and his prosthesis cleaned, ready for the next day, without trying to do it all while pissed. Tooru understood this. But right now, it just irritated him.

Other amputees drank. Other amputees still played sports. It was Iwa-chan, who was being all or nothing, Iwa-chan who –

“Bastard,” he mumbled. And then he was standing again. The hallway tilted to one side, and then righted itself. Good hallway. Tooru patted the wall in appreciation, and then began to make his way to where he thought the exit was. Air. That was what he needed. To breathe. 

The bus stop was in front of a wedding dress shop. Pure, white light shone through gauze and silk, out onto the pavement, refracted through the diry glass back of the stop. Tooru inhaled exhaust fumes, cigarette smoke, the crisp spring breeze. His hand shifted from the bench, rested on his knee. It was still hurting. Weird. Usually, it would have stopped by now.

Weird? Iwa-chan demanded in his head. It’s not like this is the first time this has happened to you, Shittykawa!

Back at Tsukuba, the volleyball gym was locked. Of course. At this time of night. Only Captain-san and the coach would be able to get in there now.

He should go back to his room. Sleep.

He should study. Mid-terms were coming up.

The tournament was almost over. He had an offer, like he’d wanted. He should dial back now, concentrate on everything else in his life. That microecons assignment. Paintballing. Yacchan had been asking him to. _Alien Attack III._ If he was going to watch it with Iwa-chan on opening night, they had to book tickets now. 

Volleyball peeled away from his life, and he was left staring at – nothing. An empty space. A flash of panic disturbed the mutedness of his thoughts, like salt on a bruise. The gym’s lock was cool and heavy in his hand. He let it drop, turned away. Caught sight of the general gym, just across the path.

Its lights glowed in the dark of the campus, calm, steady.

Tooru’s shoes crunched through gravel. Sliding doors swished open. His feet thudded on wooden floorboards, carrying him closer and closer to the sounds of balls hitting the smooth floor of a court. Different sounds from what he was used to. The rhythm regular as his heartbeat. The doors here, were propped open. Light poured into the dim corridor; noise drummed into the dark.

He paused. Counted to three. And then stepped into the light.

Standing there, he felt his eyebrows crease into what Iwa-chan called his shittiest expression. Of all the things he had been expecting to see.

Takano Hiro’s shoes squeaked on the court when he came to an abrupt stop. His eyes were as dark as Tobio’s, if not as constipated. That was where, Tooru knew, the similarities ended. “Oikawa-senpai.”

“Sorry about today,” Takano said. Handing him a bottle of Gatorade, and then dropping onto the bench beside him. 

His friends and a fourth year that had called Takano by his first name and ruffled his hair, probably a brother, were still playing.

The bottle was cool. Straight from the vending machine outside. Takano twisted the cap off his, brought it to his lips. There was nothing in his demeanour to suggest that he was sorry at all, or even that he was discomfited by Tooru’s sudden appearance.

Tooru leaned forward, fixing his gaze on that neutral face. “What did happen today?” 

The boy wiped a hand over his mouth. Stray Gatorade, or sweat. “I get nosebleeds when I’m stressed out. Most of the time, it’s fine. I just tip my head up for a bit, and it goes away. Other times, I panic.”

Crying, so softly that he could have been a programme on mute, fingers twisted into Tooru’s sleeve, bleeding over the both of them.

The coolness of the Gatorade in his hand was condensing into water. Takano’s maybe-brother whooped, his voice echoing in the vastness of the gym. Someone else groaned. “You should have come with us,” Tooru said. “We missed you.”

Takano smiled. “I don’t think so, Oikawa-senpai. I’m too new to the team for that. But, thank you.”

This wasn’t even his job, anymore. “You’re still one of us. You don’t have to be on the court to be that.”

The glass of Takano’s reserve shifted, seemed to yield. When he bowed his head, he appeared to Tooru as if he were both closer, and farther away. An intimacy like darkness against his eyelids. “Senpai,” he said. “I’m quitting volleyball.”

Tooru’s foot scraped on the floor. An involuntary movement. “But – ”

“I hate it.”

Yes, he thought. Blankly. Yes, he could hear that in Takano’s voice.

“Ever since I was a kid – ” A pause. The boy’s eyes flicked upwards, to where his brother was lifting the ball up to another goal. It arced in the air, graceful in its own way, Tooru supposed in the part of his mind that automatically calculated these things, and hit the rim. A dull thunk. Before it dropped into the net. 

“You know,” Takano said. “How I picked volleyball?”

It was a weird way to phrase it.

“Out of a hat. Kaa-san and Tou-san cut a sheet of paper into strips, wrote down random things onto it, and then – ” He crushed air into balls, threw them into a non-existent hat, picked one out. When he opened his palm, it was empty. Of course it was. “Volleyball. I haven’t stopped training since. You see, my family doesn’t believe in not doing your absolute best. In – ” Another pause. As if he found it difficult to believe it, too. But he ploughed on. “Quitting.”

“I can’t really blame it all on them. The winning was good. The friends I made. The rush of just _playing_. There’s something, you know. About putting all you are into one thing. You feel like. You have real purpose.”

Tooru was going to have a hangover in the morning. A headache was already beginning to press against his skull. He looked at the Gatorade, and wondered if it had the same effect as water. He wondered, why the heck was he here?

When he and Iwa-chan were thirteen years old, their parents had gone on a joint family trip to Hokkaido by car. It had been such a bloody boring journey; nothing but trees and petrol stations and horrible food along the way. He’d never been a nature person.

But there was this one bit. Kaa-san had tried to get him excited about it – Tooru, darling, it’s the longest tunnel in Japan, did you know? We’ll be going under the _sea_ – yeah, Shittykawa, so shut up, will you – and it’d worked, for the most part. Just.

“It was the contract, I guess. The idea of playing for a year, of having to play for a year. I suppose, ” Restlessness threaded Takano’s tone. “You start to think: it’ll never end. You get somewhere, you achieve something, but there’s more. It doesn’t end.”

Tooru thought of the darkness, in the tunnel. The amber glow of the lights overhead, the starker, but more dissipated glare of the headlights as the car sped through what his thirteen year old self had imagined must look like a wormhole at the bottom of the sea. 

“But,” he said. “Isn’t that okay, if you love it?” Isn’t it better?

Takano smiled. A soft, slow shift in expression. It jarred. “I don’t love it, Oikawa-senpai. Not anymore."

His shoes squeaked on the floor. Looking down at Tooru, his face was calm once more. A stagnant pool. “But you’re probably wondering why I’m telling you all of this. I’m sorry. Do you want to play basketball with us? I can teach you.”

Tooru had played basketball before. It would have been simple enough to say this. But his tongue felt heavy. Numb. It was easier just to stand.

His junior – ex-junior – explained the rules to him. He pretended to listen.

Someone put a ball in his hands. What was he supposed to do with it? It was orange all over. Not like a volleyball at all.

Takano was a genius. Maybe not as talented as Tobio-chan was, but if anyone had the potential to surpass Karasuno’s ace setter, then it would have been Takano. Talent wasn’t enough, after all. Talent was static, but hard work. It was up to you how hard you worked.

That was something Tooru used to believe.

Takano was a genius, and a hard worker, and he hated volleyball.

This was something Tooru had never even considered, before.

Loving. Hating. He knew that these things were important. He’d picked volleyball, because he was interested. He’d stuck at it, because he enjoyed it. But he didn’t enjoy it. Not anymore.

So why was he playing?

“Oikawa-san,” said Takano’s maybe-brother. Who was standing in front of him, hands outstretched. Why? Oh. He was guarding him. “You have to pass the ball, or shoot. Don’t just stand there!”

Tooru bounced the ball a few times. At least in this, it felt like a volleyball. And then, he feinted left, drove right, and passed the ball to Takano. Someone laughed. A guy with hair dyed a brilliant red, who shouted, “What are you doing, Aki? Defend the pride of Tsukuba’s basketball team, will you!”

The ball clanged against the rim of the net, going in.

People moved. Voices rang. The stripes of the court were strangely coloured. Red instead of blue. Curved, instead of rectangular. The drum of the ball on the court: like a heartbeat. 

He’d thought, he was playing because he couldn’t go out like this. Without beating Ushiwaka-chan. Tobio-chan. There were things he still had to do. Goals he had to reach. He hadn’t gotten to the end yet, it wasn’t at an end yet –

But he knew now. After seeing Tobio-chan again. No, that wasn’t why he was playing.

He’d thought, he was playing because playing – that was enough. It didn’t matter if he lost to Ushiwaka, Tobio, all the other fucking geniuses out there. As long as he got to stand on the court a bit longer, as long as he got to set another ball –

It wasn’t that.

It’d stopped being as simple as that. 

Somehow, the ball was once again in his hands. Takano’s maybe-brother, Aki was standing a little too close. 

After the match – the match that Iwa-chan had walked out on, the girl following closely behind him – Yanagida had beckoned Tooru over from the bench to the edge of the bleachers. There was a man with him. Pot belly sticking out over his trousers, a cheerful twinkle in a harsh, weatherbeaten face.

“Oikawa-kun, is it?” His card glinted white under the spotlights. “Taniguchi Genro. Manager of FC Tokyo. Congratulations. That was a good game.”

What had he even said?

Taniguchi-san, he imagined saying. Over a nondescript desk in a nondescript office where, for some reason, he could hear birdsong and in the distance, the whitewashed backside of the general gym. I have a proposition. As a university student, supported by my parents, I have no need of a salary at this time. As such, I would like it if you could take the money that is being paid to me and use it to provide amputees with prostheses custom-made for volleyball. Not only would it raise your profile through an act of corporate social responsibility, but –

Stepping away from Aki, he bent his knees to take the shot.

Pain sliced through the joint. Fuck. He jumped anyway. But too slowly, slower than Aki had anticipated. Aki, who was standing too close. Even as the ball left his hands, he knew they were going to collide.

“Can you – ”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“I’m so, so sorry – ”

“Nii-san, please shut up. You’re not being helpful. Oikawa-senpai, I’m going to have to call 911.”

“Oikawa-senpai?”

The lights in the gym were brighter than before. They swam – there were tears in his eyes. He’d felt his ankle pop. Was that bad? He was pretty sure it was bad. And he’d been sure it was going to be his fucking knee.

“Are you _crying_ – ”

“Nii-san!”

“Aki, Hiro-kun, stop arguing. Seriously. Ask him if there’s someone we can call for him. I’ll get bloody 911.”

“Senpai, is there someone you want to call?”

Iwa-chan.

“What?”

Iwa-chan was going to kill him.

“I think he said, Iwa…chan. You know who that is, Hiro? No? Get his phone then.”

“Oikawa-senpai, I need your phone." 

“I think he’s gone mute. It’s probably in his pocket.”

“Nii-san, you can’t just – ”

He grabbed Aki’s wrist. Bony, but strong under his fingers. In the tunnel, the never-ending tunnel, he had gripped Hajime’s wrist in the same way. His best friend’s voice hadn’t broken yet, back then. But the grumpy gruffness had been exactly the same. “Don’t tell me you’re scared, Oikawa.”

“I told you not to call me that!”

“And I told you, we aren’t babies anymore!”

“Boys.” Hajime’s mother sounded scarily like her son. They both shut up.

But Tooru had clung on, and after a while, Hajime inched his wrist up, out of his grasp, and fit their hands together instead. If Hajime was clinging on just as tightly, in the dark, Tooru knew better than to say it out loud.

The steadiness of his voice, now, surprised him. Brought him down from the edge of his own hysteria. “I don’t need you to call anyone, Aki-san.”

Takano frowned at him. “No one?”

The floor was slippery, cold beneath his palm. His ankle felt like it was on fire. But the strangest part, and this made him want to laugh, was how cool the rest of him felt. It had been a long time since he’d been on a court, and not worked up a sweat.

He smiled. Flipped Takano a peace sign. “There’s no point in worrying anyone, is there? At this time of night.”

 


	7. Chapter 7

Sitting outside Yamato Sports Centre with a trimmed hedge poking into his back, Hajime listened to his call go to voicemail for the hundredth time. There was nobody to shout at, so he ground his teeth instead. Chucked his phone into his backpack, and stuck his legs out in front of him. Inspected the overcast sky. He didn’t have an umbrella. 

Aw, Iwa-chan, he imagined Oikawa saying. Your non-existent fangirls would really be disappointed, if they knew how unreliable you are!

He wasn’t the bloody unreliable one here.

His phone started to ring. With unnecessary speed, he grabbed it, checked the ID. 

“Iwa-chan,” his best friend sang. “What’s up?”

“Where the fuck have you been, Trashkawa?" 

“Studying. Mid-terms are coming up, aren’t they? Yacchan assured me I would know absolutely nothing, and you know, he’s right!”

Oikawa’s voice was like butter, golden and sweet. Hajime’s mood worsened. “What have you done now?”

Silence. He imagined that Oikawa was biting the head of his pen, worrying the metal with his teeth. And then: “Is there something in particular you wanted, Iwa-chan? Only I was in the library.”

Hajime bit down on his lip. Hard enough to draw blood. And then cursed himself. He’d promised himself that he wasn’t going to be mad at Oikawa, not anymore. It was his own problem, wasn’t it? So he’d solve it. 

But not being mad at Oikawa didn’t mean not getting mad at him.

It was too late. The idiot had gone and read something into the silence, and his tone now turned business-like. “If there’s nothing – ”

“I need you to meet me somewhere. I’ll text you the address.”

The smell of the leaves and the dampness of the air welled around him, a crisp, almost retiring odour. Sandals clacked on the cement steps to his right. A belated chuckle crackled down the line. “Sorry, Iwa-chan. I don’t think I can.”

His fingers stuttered on the pebbled surface of his seat. He collected himself. Why was he so surprised? Oikawa wouldn’t drop everything and come, just because he’d said so, with fuck-all notice. Had Hajime really expected him to –

Yes, he realised. Because, the idiot always had before. When it was important. But Oikawa didn’t know it was important. 

They weren’t kids anymore. They weren’t teenagers, living just a street across from each other. They weren’t – his grip tightened on his phone. Well, if Oikawa didn’t know something, he just had to tell him, didn’t he? He sucked in a breath.

His best friend said, “I really am sorry.” Remote. Turned in into himself.

When Hajime was eight years old, a couple of months after Oikawa appeared on his street with a large moving van and tons of boxes, and then again in his classroom on day one of their first year, all bubbly smiles and awkward grace, they’d climbed the hill behind Oikawa’s grandfather’s house.

Tooru had had a real, expensive camera slung around his neck, and a scab on his cheek that he’d kept picking at, even though Hajime had told him to leave off it about a hundred times already.

How had he gotten it? Playing football in the rain.

It was been something like one at night, and they were supposed to be in bed. But there was going to a meteor shower, Tooru said. It was on the news, and if Baa-san and Jii-san couldn’t understand how _important_ that was to the human race, then he, Tooru, was just going to have to sneak out. Hajime had been forced to come.

Sitting together on the top of that hill made them feel brave, kind of like they were all grown up and out on their own. Like – bandits, or thieves, or ninjas. They talked while they waited, the torches wrapped around their wrists hovering over the grass at their feet. Whispering, as if there was anybody within a mile to hear them. Dumb kid stuff. Hajime remembered none of it. 

What he remembered was that first shooting star. 

Hajime hadn’t believed in aliens, even then. But watching that fire burn through the sky, a lone spirit hurtling towards earth – his mind opened. He believed, for one breathless moment, that a spaceship was careening into their world.

Catching at his best friend’s sleeve, he tugged hard.

There was no reply. No reaction. Hajime turned, frowning.

Tooru’s eyes were like dark glass. The shooting stars, falling now like snow, reflected in them. His mouth had relaxed into total sobriety. Every muscle still.

Hajime’s hand fell away.

Maybe sensing the movement, Tooru turned. His features unfolded into a grin.

“Hajime,” he crowed. “Isn’t it cool?”

“Idiot!”

“Ow! What was that for?”

It was just a moment. Thinking: his best friend was an alien.

But maybe because it was the first time, the first time since they’d met, since they’d gotten to know each other, since they’d somehow become so entangled in each other’s lives that Hajime didn’t know how to get untangled – he never forgot it.

The distance between them.

“Iwa-chan?”

He’d gone quiet again. Whatever the hell Oikawa read into that, he didn’t know. “It’s nothing,” he said. Gruff. “Go do what you have to, then. And bloody pick up next time.”

Slipping his phone into his jacket, he got to his feet. Looked up at the blue and white front of the city gym. On a curved copper pillar before it, a clock struck twelve. Fuck, but Oikawa would have laughed at that.

Well. There was no more reason to stall. Squaring his shoulders, he started up the steps.

Hajime had never been inside the Yamato Sports Centre. Entering the multipurpose floor from under the blue bleachers, he found himself in a gym as big as Keio’s, but warmer. Light glanced off the wooden walls, the wood-panelled floor. Green netting seemed to fall from the heavens, dividing one court from the next. On this, the first court, a little boy kicked a ball straight across the gleaming floor and into the padded gloves of the pig-tailed goalie. The two of them scowled at each other. The boy tipped his nose up. 

That show of arrogant defiance; Hajime had to smile. 

And then his gaze fell on the second court, and his heart settled somewhere in his gut again. His prosthesis was swimming in sweat. He forced himself to keep moving.  

The players sitting on the floor weren’t all amputees like he was. Sure, shortened limbs dominated, which was kind of weird for him in the first place. But two or three of them didn’t look like they were – different at all. Just regular folk. A few eyes followed him, curious. Then the ball came back over their side of the net, and focus shifted back to the game.

“Well,” said a voice. “I think I know you.”

Hajime snapped his head forward, crashing to a halt. He’d nearly fucking walked into somebody. A boy, around his age, with tousled black hair and sleepy eyes. Balancing a clipboard on his shoulder.

“Iwa – izumi, isn’t it.”

Who the –

A bow. So polite it might have been mocking him, except that the kid looked completely serious. “Akaashi Keiji. Formerly of Fukurodani.”

Fukurodani. That was in Tokyo. Akaashi. Oikawa had brought him up once, when he was flipping idly through one of his magazines.

“Ah,” he said. And bowed too. Cautiously. “I don’t think we’ve met.”

“No.” After a pause, he added, “Bokuto-san pointed Seijou out to me once. He said it was a pity your team never made it to Nationals. And you used to play for Keio.”

Hajime felt that there was an inference he was meant to be drawing here.

Akaashi said, “I go to Keio." 

If lightning could have hit.

“You – don’t play?”

“No.” Another pause. “I coach. The kids’ team here. Coach Aizawa is swamped today, so he asked me to supervise while he handled something. Is this your first time here? You’ll have to get a centre registration form.” Twisting his pen over his fingers in what was on him a curiously adolescent gesture, he scribbled something down on his clipboard.

Hajime held out his hands. “Wait. I mean. I’m just here to watch.”

A pause. “I see.”

There was nothing particular in the way that Akaashi looked at him. His eyes half-slitted like that, pen now still against his clipboard, shoulders slumped in mild exhaustion or just out of habit – he could have been thinking about anything from his dinner to the state of his shoes.

To Hajime’s right, out of his line of sight, a ball skidded on the polished floor.

“Ace!” someone shouted.

How could it have been? The sound had been so soft. The twist of a shoe on the court more than the press of a ball against a painted white line; more than the breath before the referees stuck their arms straight out, acknowledging the point; more than the surge of pure joy that started in his feet and rushed into his gut, his lungs, his heart.

Akaashi, a stranger, looked at him with familiar eyes. Behind him, somewhere he couldn’t see, somebody slapped a hand against the floor in triumph, or despair. In the heat of the indoor gym, sweat leaked into his socket.

“Um,” he said. His throat felt strange. The world seemed to tilt, to stretch out of shape. His metal foot took a step back. The ground muffled like a sponge beneath it. The good foot took another step. Floor hard, unyielding. “I think I might come back.”

A slow blink. And then Akaashi said, “Wait.”

It wasn’t as if he could go very fast on this metal stick. The vast, brown space of the gym exchanged itself for the small quiet of the hallway, the blue-papered noticeboards along one wall, the dusty bars of white light that buzzed down on his head.

Akaashi’s hand caught his shoulder. “Iwaizumi-san.” 

He’d run away. He’d fucking run away. The flush was already starting on his skin. He counted to three. Then forced himself to turn around. Look the boy in the face.

“Iwaizumi-san,” Akaashi repeated. And hesitated. Eyes sliding to the side. Clearly, he hadn’t thought this through. At last, he said, “Maybe you could bring a friend. The next time. It’s easier, sometimes. Not to do new things alone.”

The door to the gym was closing. Slowly. Meandering. One of those heavy doors with a bar along the outside. The notice pasted on it – fire door; keep shut – looked as if it had been scratched to pieces. Like the alien Deoxys stickers on Oikawa’s desktop back at his house, shredded by bored fingernails.

It was that thought that made him say, “I did.” 

That slow blink. Did Akaashi know how much like an owl it made him look? It grounded Hajime in reality. “Thank you, Akaashi. I’ll see you around.”

The strangeness didn’t leave him on the train. He plugged into his i-Phone, leaned his head against the black window, and shut his eyes. Miles sped away beneath his feet. Shoes thudded, clacked, tapped around him. The doors puffed open and closed. The plastic seat pressed against his thighs.

It’d just been bloody sitting volleyball. What was he, a prejudiced jerk? 

Just because it was different didn’t mean it was worse. 

Just because it was different didn’t mean he had to panic about it. What was he, five?

He dug a hand into his hair. Gripped tight.

“You okay?”

His eyes flew open. Yamamoto was standing in front of him, one hand wrapped around a grab handle, the other shoved inside a coat pocket. He was wearing a designer shirt, and a pair of combat pants with more zips than Hajime could count at first glance. Eyes torn between concern and an irritatingly Oikawa-like suspicion. “You look kind of dead,” he said.

Two fucking acquaintances in one day. What were the odds? 

“Yamamoto,” he grunted in greeting. Dropped his hand back into his lap. “I’m fine.”

The train curved sharply, and the boy’s fingers tightened on the handle. When they’d straightened out again, he said, “What are you doing so far from Keio?”

The lie, whilst automatic, came out grudgingly. “Seeing a friend. What about you?”

Yamamoto’s lip twisted. His head turned. Hajime tamped down on his annoyance, turned up the music on his i-Pod. Then regretted it. When Yamamoto’s mouth moved, he couldn’t hear a damn thing he said. He ripped out his earphones. “What?”

Air-conditioned air hissed down the back of his neck. Yamamoto’s shoulders hunched. And then, quickly, as if a dam had burst inside him, he said, “You have to go and see Oikawa. He said not to say anything to you, but he’s been moping around for a week, and it’s fucking getting on my nerves." 

His gut clenched. “Why? What’s wrong with him?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“You already broke your word, what’s the difference!”

The train was crowded. The dozens of heads squashed within half a metre of his shout, turned to look at him. Some interested, others tight with disapproval.  

“It’s not,” Yamamoto hissed. “Like I wanted to break my word. Ask. Him. Yourself.”

To get to Tsukuba from where he was, he had to change lines. Yamamoto didn’t say goodbye. Just tapped away furiously at his phone, as if the sound of bashing keys could relieve his frustration, or guilt, or anger.

Hajime hadn’t been to Tsukuba since – then.

It didn’t look any different.

Bitterly, he wondered why he’d thought it would. Standing at the bus stop, the sky grey and heavy above him, watching the tyres of the bus work dust up into the air, he pressed speed dial. “Oikawa,” he said, once the tinny automated voice had cut off. “Meet me outside your central library, or else.”

The bastard wasn’t there. Of course he wasn’t.

Stone columns rose above his head, steel-gridded glass walls gleamed dully down at him, the rubber casing of the revolving doors brushed open air again and again. The air was humid against his skin, damp and close. He grabbed the elbow of the first person coming out, said, “Can I – ” His voice was too harsh. 

He forced himself to calm down. Willed the world to stop twisting, to stop deforming itself. “Can I borrow your card. You can keep – ” he shrugged his backpack off. “ – this. It’s got my wallet in it, so. I won’t run away or anything.”

The doors let him into a white, lighted space. Beneath one shoe, he could feel the softness of the beige carpet. He flipped his phone in his hand, glanced around. The metal casing was warm from his body heat, and smooth.

Who knew how many calls to voicemails, how many texts cursorily answered, and he’d never thought – maybe he should come and check on him. Maybe there was something wrong, maybe there was something he should know. 

He pressed call again. It went to voicemail. The carpet on the first floor was grey. People and shelves alternated, a pattern on a chessboard. Eyes flicked up to meet his, then away, already buried once more in their own lives.

After what happened, Hajime was transferred to a hospital in Sendai for rehab. Oikawa had taken the bus down to see him every week, and then, as he got better, became less confused, frustrated, angry – he understood now that he had been angry – he’d come every other week. They’d fight at least once, and then be forced to make up over the phone, because it just sucked. Holding a grudge over such a long time.

Except there had been a grudge.

There had been things they weren’t saying.

Oikawa had known, same as he had: things were different now.

The last shelves gave way to an open space. White tables, topped with yellow lamps. Books, and papers, and the low-grade noise of people sighing, turning pages, tapping laptop keys, scratching notes. It was Oikawa’s head he saw first. 

A rich, dark colour. Hajime knew what it felt like under his fingers. Melted chocolate.

The next thing he saw was the crutches.

Oikawa snapped a page, exhaled explosively through his nose. Then, sensing something, just like he had at eight years old, he looked up. Froze.

And then, slowly, his lip edged into a smile.

The rain started with a drip. A drop of water hitting the ground, the sound like a shogi tile set down on a board. They’d played that once, on a day as gloomy as this. It’d been Kaa-san’s board. He could remember lying next to the balcony doors, listening to first the wind howl, and then Tooru, who quickly figured out he was losing.

The crutches leaned against a stone pillar. Oikawa sat with his leg stretched out in front of him, heel on the ground. His toes, sticking out of the white athletic tape, looked stupid. Alien.

“It’s just a sprain,” the idiot said. “In another three weeks, I’ll be off the crutches, and in another two to four, I’ll be playing again.” 

Drip, drip, drip. Collecting and intensifying into a patter. A roar.

Hajime kept his voice even. Controlled. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Oikawa’s fingers tensed on the seat between them. He smiled. “You know, I hate it when you sound like that. All blank and really not like Iwa-chan at all.”

The cold spring air rose from the earth, misted before them. Water spilled down from the roof of the verandah, hopped like white rabbits on concrete.

Brightly. “I didn’t want Iwa-chan to be mad at me, of course! You’re terrible when you’re mad. I was scared.” His fingers curled into themselves. Then lifted off the seat altogether, rested in his lap.

There was an inch of stone between them.

“Iwa-chan. Say something.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“I really am sorry.”

“What the _fuck_ for?”

It was raining like hell, but the sky wasn’t completely dark. Not like it was in the dry, in this stretched out shadow under a roof. Dim light infused the grey mist beyond, treaded the border between outside and in.

He hadn’t wanted to blame Oikawa. Between blaming Oikawa and doing something about his own problem, it was pretty obvious what Hajime would pick.

But it was hard. Harder than he’d thought.

It was almost enough to make him laugh. It wasn’t like he’d thought it would be easy. Just. He looked at his hands. They were paler than they used to be, after months out of the sun. The change had been so gradual. He hadn’t noticed until now.

He’d said to Oikawa, I want things to be normal.

He’d understood, they couldn’t go back to how they were. 

“You know,” he said. “Why I won’t play? Anymore.”

The smell of damp soil rose around them. Of earth, solid and inescapable. Oikawa swallowed. His Adam’s apple shifting downwards, then tugged back into place.

Hajime said, “Cos’ it’ll be different.”

Quiet. “I know. You’ve said. Iwa-chan – ”

“But it’s not just that.” The heaviness at the back of his head. The hardness. He didn’t know: was this meant to be a confession, or a punishment? Was he trying to help himself, or hurt his best friend?

He’d wanted to hurt him.

He’d wanted not to be the only one. 

“It’s what it means. The difference. If I pick up that ball – ” his hands curled in his lap, automatic, cradling air. “ – if I serve it, and it goes over the net, and it’s different, it’s not enough. Then. That’s it. There’s no going back. You know?”

You understand?

Hajime hadn’t understood. He’d thought he had.

He’d thought he accepted it. He didn’t.

He was scared.  

Oikawa sucked in a breath.

“And,” the smile on Hajime’s mouth wasn’t really a smile. It was too sharp, jagged. He felt as if he were trembling, even though his hands were steady, and his limbs relaxed. He could have been talking about the weather. “All that, you know. What was it for? If you’re going to fucking ruin yourself anyway, what was it for?” 

Oikawa said, “I don’t know!”

The cement roof. The beige, brick walls. The sliding doors behind them, closed. The curtain of rain. His best friend’s voice ricocheted off the bars of their cage, back at them. It rang in Hajime’s ears.

Oikawa’s head dipped forward, towards the ground. His jaw was hard. 

Hajime got up. The doors slid open. He didn’t look back.

At fuck o’clock that night, the ringing of his phone fragmenting his dreams, he felt along his desk, knocked something that sounded like the bottle of the tramadol – shit – onto the floor, and peeled his eyes open enough to squint at the ID. 

His voice grated on his throat. “Tou-san?”

“Hey there, junior.”

He could already feel irritation creasing his eyebrows. The only people in the world – Tou-san and Oikawa – “What do you want?”

“Your mother tried calling you three times today, and couldn’t get through. So I decided to give it a go. And look at that. I really must be a lucky bugger.”

He buried his face in his pillow. Counted to three. And then said, flatly, “She doesn’t have to call me every day. I’m twenty years old.”

“That doesn’t mean you can just ignore her.”

“I know,” he said. “I know, I know – ” He cut himself off.

It’d stopped raining sometime in the evening. His room was dead quiet. 

“Junior,” Tou-san said. “You okay?” 

He said, “Stop asking me that.”

Silence. Drug-induced drowsiness hung over him like a cloud. His mouth felt like a desert. He felt weirdly comfortable, almost like he was drowning. “Stop asking me if I’m okay. Of if it’s difficult. Or if I need help. Stop treating me like a kid.”

“We’re just worried about you, Hajime.”

“Don’t be worried about me. Don’t – just – I’m sick of saying it. That I’m okay. I’m sick of having to _reassure_ you – ”

“You don’t – ”

“Just stop asking me.”

Shit, he needed to sleep. He just really needed to sleep.

Tou-san’s voice was low. Like water flowing over him, the broad strokes of a river turning, tumbling into a tiny tributary. Bubbling past fields and fields of rice plants, and deep black pools. “You’ve always been a really independent kid. I guess it’s only to be expected. But, you know, junior. Kaa-san and me. We don’t need you to be okay. We’ll worry, whether or not you are. That’s what we do.”

If he wasn’t so tired. If he wasn’t so deep in the land of sleep. If he wasn’t so vested in his pride. Maybe he would have cried.

“Okay, then. Back to bed with you, Hajime. Goodnight. I love you.”

There was a click. And he was left listening to a long, long beep.

Morning descended upon him. Cool, remote. Turning over onto his back, he peeled open dirt-caked eyes to stare up at his ceiling. Large, whitewashed tiles. The sun slanted upwards through the window, cast the world into shadow. 

The tilted, stretched out, unordinary world.

He knew now, what he had to do.


	8. Chapter 8

The knock on Tooru’s door was soft. Reluctant. On the opposite side of the room, behind the window grill, night demurred. Papers and books were strewn over the desk. Tooru looked down at them. Bit a little too hard at the head of his pen. The knock didn’t come again. But he said, “Come in.”

A click. Eyes weighed on his back.

Yacchan said, “I guess it didn’t go well.”

Tooru chewed for a couple of seconds. Trying to get his temper under control. He gave up. “Yacchan," he whirled on his friend. "How could you!”

The boy scowled. “It was stupid not to tell him in the first place! What were you going to do, avoid him for a month and a half? Because, that’s how long it’s going to be before you get that tape off, Oikawa. And you were bloody gloomy, besides.”

“I was not. It’s just been weird, okay, not having practice, not having anything to do – ”

“That’s just it.”

The dimmer light in the hallway painted pits beneath Yacchan’s eyes. In the edges of his frown. “That’s just it,” said Yacchan. Twisting the doorknob uselessly, frustratedly. “It is weird. It’s weird that you don’t know what to do with yourself when you’re not playing volleyball. That you act like a fucking ghost when you _can’t_ practise. Sometimes,” he paused.

“ _Some_ times, Oikawa, I get the feeling that you think nothing has meaning unless it’s volleyball.”

They stared at each other.

Tooru folded his arms on the back of his chair. Allowed his mouth to quirk into a smile. “Poor Yacchan. Having to deal with someone like me.”

His friend’s head turned, bowed. Embarassed, maybe. Tired. “That’s not what I meant.”

“No,” Tooru said. “ _I_ meant it in a good way, really. You see,” he laughed. “You see, I’m an obssessive person, Yacchan. Especially about volleyball. There was a time, long before you met me, when I was so obssessed about it that I wanted to hurt things. People. One person. But I had Iwa-chan.”

It had stopped raining a while ago. The air was still cool. Fresh and clean. Tooru didn’t know if the coldness in his heart was just a reflection of that, his surroundings; or whether it was something that had started inside him, in a place to which he had once been blind.

Kindly, he said, “It looks like I have you too, don’t I, Yacchan? Thank you.”

Yacchan left nothing behind. Just a closed door. A silence, where before, he had been able to hear the noises of the corridor outside. The tiny kitchen and the stairwell. Tooru stared for a while at the equations he was meant to be studying, and then hopped over to his cupboard. Pulled out the first jacket he saw. Iwa-chan’s cap was sitting on the second shelf to the right. The green thread of the panels was faded now. Pale green was a stupid colour for a cap, he’d thought back then. Not practical at all.

Why would I, Iwa-chan had asked him a few weeks back.

Why would you, Tooru thought.

The stab of coldness he felt then, the bitterness – how ungrateful could he be?

He put the cap on his head, and reached for his crutches. 

There was nowhere in particular for him to go.

Just somewhere, he guessed. Somewhere he didn’t have to think about what he’d done, and said, and how close Yacchan’s words had hit to home.

It wasn’t fun, being peeled apart like that. He wondered if that was how fish felt, when people scaled them, left them lying naked, exposed on a chopping board. But he supposed that by then, they were usually dead.

He’d thought that Iwa-chan was dead. 

Just for a second. In the hospital, when he woke up, and his father, holding tightly on to his hand, had burst into tears. Everything hurt; his head ached. He would later discover that when Iwa-chan shoved him out of the way, he’d hit the pavement, and gotten a concussion.

He’d asked, where’s Iwa-chan?

And the stricken look on his parents’ faces, right before they launched into assurances – he’s fine, he’s fine, Tooru, only – his mind had catapulted to the worst conclusion. There was nothing quite like it. Thinking, _knowing_ that someone you loved was dead. Nothing prepared you for it. Nothing compared. 

And yet, bizarrely, the memory of that feeling, that moment, eased him somewhat. Perhaps it reminded him: a problem was just that. A problem. A fight was just that. A fight. At the very least, he knew where he was going now.

On a Saturday night near a university campus, at two in the morning, the streets were deserted but for a few drunken idiots wandering around in groups, swinging bottles and singing at the top of their offkey voices. The vast space of the city, the roads and the rows of building disappearing into the horizon, branching off into uncountable places unknown, bore down uncomfortably, almost as if it were unsure what to do with itself.

Only one window in Iwa-chan’s dorm was lighted, on the very top floor. A lonely, waking eye.

Idiot, Iwa-chan cursed in his head. D’you think I would be awake?

Tooru stared at the grey door, beyond which he knew lay a dark corridor, and at the end of that, Iwa-chan’s room. He could go in, at least. Sit next to his best friend’s door and wait for him to wake up. But, thinking of Iwa-chan’s face if he woke up to find him there, a wry smirk worked itself onto Tooru’s face. Maybe if he wanted to be murdered first thing in the morning.

The crutches were digging into his armpits. Fuck, he just wanted to sit down.

Hobbling over the fence that separated a tiny strip of grass and a couple of short conifers from the road, he braced a hand on a thin bar, lowered himself onto the gradual incline of road that led up to the dorm from the street. Stretched his legs out in front of him. Usually, he would be in bed by now, with his ankle elevated on a pillow. But beggars couldn’t be choosers.

He leaned his head against the fence behind him. Slid his hands into his pockets. Something thin and sharp brushed his fingers. He pulled it out.

The card. He must have been wearing this jacket when Yacchan gave it back to him. FC Tokyo was printed in flowing, blue cursive on the front. Taniguchi’s name printed below it. He turned it over. The back was blank.

Taniguchi-san, not only would such a scheme raise your profile through an act of corporate social responsibility, but –

The pads of his fingers pressed into the card. He was angry. He hadn’t expected to be angry. But, why did he have to lie? Why did he have to ask a volleyball club, a corporation, can you set up this scheme to help amputees using my money so that my best friend doesn’t find out that it’s me, he won’t accept it if it’s me. Why did Iwa-chan have to be so afraid – why did he have to be afraid it would be _different_?

It would be. Even with the best prosthesis in the world, it wouldn’t be the same.

The crackle of plastic caught his attention. Looking up, he watched a crumpled bag blow over tar, pavement, circle a streetlamp that seemed to bend under the weight of the night, even though it was made of steel and most definitely, logically, utterly straight. Cool air seeped into his skin. 

Slowly, inevitably, the anger left him.

After they’d lost the match to Karasuno, Tooru hadn’t crumbled. He hadn’t lost it. The team went to eat together, like they always did, and then the third years played themselves to exhaustion in the gym, the sunlight sinking, turning dark as blood, and he’d thanked them all. He’d cried then. But it was the good kind of crying. The kind that left him feeling empty, new. Not half-dead.

The match against Karasuno – it wasn’t the end. Defeat was crushing, Ushiwaka-chan was a frustrating bastard who he wouldn’t get to face again for a while, but it wasn’t the end. That thought gave him hope. It made him strong.

And, of course, there had been Iwa-chan.

Iwa-chan, whose attention had reeled back and re-focused with the intensity of a hunting dog on their entrance exams. Who smacked him every time he threatened to distract them from their studies. For whom the world had always been clearly, obviously bigger than just volleyball.

It was ironic, if you thought about it.Tooru couldn’t give Iwa-chan his leg back. He couldn’t walk for him, or feel his phantom pains for him. He couldn’t return to him the life he’d once had. What Tooru could do for him was give him back, even if incompletely, volleyball.

Without that, what use was he?

He supposed that this was why, selfishly, he couldn’t let the matter go.

His gaze meandered up the floors of the dorm, to the sky. Night seemed to perch on the roof of the building, an enormous bat peering down at him, its enormous, black wings unfurled and blanketing the horizon. The moon was a silver, slitted eye. Exactly, he realised, as it’d been on the 29th of August, 2016.

And so it would reach this point, over and over again.

Exhaustion, leaden, seeped into him. Maybe he’d shut his eyes for a second.

“Oikawa, what the fuck!”

Iwa-chan was always so loud first thing in the morning – five more minutes –

“ _Oikawa!_ ”

Wakefulness took him by the shoulders and shook him, hard. The sudden imbalance sent him reeling into daylight, his eyes flying open. To find his best friend’s patented glare inches from his face. Instinctively, he reared backwards, and slammed his head into the fence behind him. “Ow!”

“What the hell, let me look at that – stop moving, you idiot!”

“ _I’m_ the idiot? What were you trying to do, Iwa-chan? Murder me with your ugly face?”

Finally, Iwa-chan dropped down next to him. A sigh exploding out of his chest. They were sitting shoulder to shoulder, barely an inch apart. As always, Tooru found his gaze dragged, reluctantly, to the glint of steel between the hem of his best friend’s pants, and his shoe. 

“You,” Iwa-chan said. His voice sharp and flat in the dawn quiet. “Were sleeping out here. In the open. Where anybody could have robbed you, or killed you, or both.”

Tooru grinned. “Not for the whole night.”

“You think this is funny." 

He scratched the back of his neck. His skin felt frosted over. The only part of him that was warm was his head, with the cap jammed tight over it. Plucking it off, the bill pinched between his fingers, he found himself staring down at the white lettering stitched onto the front.

Why would I, Iwa-chan had asked him once.

How should he know? If Iwa-chan was going to do something, he should fucking come up with the reason for himself.

His voice came out taut. “I got an offer from FC Tokyo.”

Of course, Iwa-chan noticed. His sideways glance at Tooru was as familiar as the feeling of ground beneath his feet, the slide of a spring breeze against his cheek, the hush of a time before the world woke. He said nothing. 

After a week of inertia, Tooru’s knee no longer hurt. The pressure in his gut, a key screwing itself into the wrong lock, was only his imagination. “I don’t need the money, I really don’t, so, please. Please help me convince Ji-chan and Ba-chan.”

“I can’t take – ” Iwa-chan stopped. Tooru couldn’t look at him. His gaze was sealed onto the cap. “It won’t change anything. Oikawa." 

“That’s not what you said before. You said before that it would be different. Well, so what if it’s different? As long as it’s not the end – ”

That was what he used to believe, not Iwa-chan.

“As long as you can play again – " 

The words were empty, even to him. 

“It won’t,” his best friend said. “Make you stop feeling guilty.”

He was transparent. With Iwa-chan, he was always peeled raw.

Iwa-chan shifted. His metal foot knocked against Tooru’s. The intimacy was jarring.

“Sometimes, Oikawa. I hate you.”

He couldn’t cry, he thought blankly. What right did he have to cry?

“Sometimes, when things are real hard, or when you’re being an especially stupid bastard, I wish it wasn’t me that’d lost a leg. I wish it wasn’t me who had to do all of this. And I think, wow. I’m a really bad person. Who,” his voice was choked. “Wishes that on his best friend?"

Tooru’s fingers pressed hard on the dark green bill of the cap. The muscles in his wrist stood out; tense. He wanted to say, it’s okay. Say, it’s normal. Say, you aren’t a bad person. You couldn’t be. But his throat was a desert.

“But you know,” said Iwa-chan. “I’ve never regretted it. What I did. Because, I know, even when I’m being a bastard and a shithead, that you might not have just lost a leg. You might not just have never played fucking volleyball again. If I hadn’t done what I did, you might’ve died.”

Dark hands, but paler than they used to be, a gradual change that Tooru had noticed only when he looked at old pictures, conjured up old memories, curled over black slacks. And then Iwa-chan turned, and Tooru found himself turning too, automatically, and they were staring each other in the eye. 

He’d thought, that night. When tires had screeched on gravel, headlights struck his eyes, and warm fingers crushed his sleeve – when Iwa-chan’s face had been dark, frightening, twisted into a desperate rage – he’d wondered, why is Iwa-chan mad at me? A simple, childish thought at a moment when there was no time to think.

Now, seeing that expression again, but muted, controlled, accepting – he understood.

“Fuck volleyball,” said his best friend. “If you ever nearly die again, Shittykawa, I’ll kill you myself.”

A car sped past them, on the deserted road. Somewhere above their heads, a window banged open. Through a white-barred fence, the smell of earth, deep, dark, mingled with exhaust fumes, concrete, dust.

Tooru said, “I don’t understand.”

Iwa-chan’s eyebrows slammed down. “What." 

“I don’t get it.”

“What is there to get?”

“Why?” 

Tooru jabbed the cap in his hand at its owner. Accusingly. “ _Why_ would you – ” 

Iwa-chan snatched the cap before it could poke him in the eye. Scowled. “What kind of question is that, you shithead? Why the hell does anybody need anybody?”

Sometimes, Iwa-chan hated him. Tooru’d been afraid of that. Iwa-chan resented him. He’d suspected that. And there was nothing – nothing he could do to fix it. In his heart, cold, growing colder, and yet somehow, calm: that was something he had always known.

But that was okay. Because, their world was bigger than that.

He held out his hand. “Give that here.”

His best friend’s face was still like thunder. 

“Give it.”

Iwa-chan threw it at him, a mean throw, without warning. But Tooru had a setter’s reflexes. Catching it was easy, plopping it onto Iwa-chan’s black, spiky head was easy. “Here. You can take this back. I’ll let you take it back.”

If his best friend could read him like an open book, Tooru had never found it so simple. Iwa-chan had always been a practical person, who shook his problems off like water, and ignored them if they stuck like barnacles to his back. It was hard to read the emotions of someone who didn’t know he had them himself.

But the look that Iwa-chan had when he was going to murder him – well. Even Yacchan could have read _that_. “Oikawa – " 

“Iwa-chan. I don’t think I ever said this. Because, really, I only ever said I was sorry.”

“You don’t – ”

“But.” His best friend glared at him. Mouth shut. “But,” Tooru continued. “I was really glad. When you didn’t die. When you didn’t die, I think.” But the words were stuck in his throat. He swallowed. Speaking again, he wanted to laugh at himself. So much for steady. So much for calm. “Thank you,” he said. “Iwa-chan. For not dying.”

The noises of morning rose around them. Multiplying, collecting, like rainwater in a puddle on a pavement. Sitting there together, a boy without a leg and another with a sprained one, their hands inches from each other – they weren’t children anymore, after all – and just one faded cap between them, they looked up at the worn slice of a moon, and the sky, in which sunlight seemed to flower, brighten; a lamp relit.

Eventually, one of them, the boy without a leg, said this: “Ah.”

 

 

**29 th August 2017**

“I think one of us should talk to him – ”

“They said the first anniversary would be difficult, remember? Maybe he wants to be left alone – "

“He hasn’t come out of his room since this morning!” 

“Oh, Tooru-kun, you’re here. Oh, wait – ”

His door banged open. The same sound it’d made at least once a week since he was eight years old. He buried his head deeper into his pillow.

“Iwa-chan.”

He might have mumbled, go away. Or just growled. Through the cotton of the pillowcase, they would all sound the same anyway.

“Iwa-chan, wake up, I need to get new shoes!”

“Leave me alone." 

“Maybe,” His mother’s voice. Tremulous in that way that signalled she was at the end of her tether. “Hajime would like to stay in today.”

Oikawa’s voice was low. Threatening. “Iwa-chan. Get up and put your fancy new leg on, or I’ll put it on for you. Backwards.”

“Tooru-kun!”

His irritation spiked. He kicked his foot free of his best friend’s grip, and lifted himself onto his elbows. “I’m up, okay! I’m up!”

“There’s no need to yell, sweetheart – " 

Hajime’s metal foot thumped unfeelingly along the pavement. Summer burned on the back of his neck, slicked his hair with sweat. When he glanced up, the sun branded itself into his eyeballs. Quickly, he looked down again. Saw that Tooru was standing next to a flight of stone steps.

A scowl sank into his face.

“Come on.” Who the hell purred in real life? “Surely you can make it up a few steps.”

“It’s not the steps I have a problem with. It’s that you won’t shut up.”

Oikawa hopped up the first. Stretched out his hand, fingers falling into a fist. “Don’t be like that, Iwa-chan! Look, I’ll even play jan-ken-pon with you, see who gets to the top first. Say it with me. Jan-ken – ” 

The frustration pulled taut. A gear at the back of his head, twisting the wrong way. Pulling everything to a grinding halt. “We aren’t kids, Shittykawa. Fuck off.”

The ugliest look of woe in the universe. “How mean! No wonder Akaike-san dumped you, Iwa-chan, if you’re going to speak so brutishly. Really, no girl would ever want to date you – ” Oikawa’s tone turned sharp. Toxic.

The day simmered around them. There was no shop window through which the world was reflected. No shadow of a moon, no blurred lines, and no stars. His leg wasn’t even being particularly irritating. There was nothing to remind him of what had happened at all, except for the date. A number that didn’t need to be circled on a calendar, input into his phone, hinted at to him by other people who remembered. A number that was carved, he felt, into his soul.

Hajime had forgotten the pain. He’d been told he would. Out of a sense of self-preservation, his brain would lock the memory away, in a place he couldn’t find. His brain was an arrogant, presuming bitch that way. He’d forgotten most of it, really.

Except for the anger. 

The helpless, the futile fear.

“Iwa-chan?”

The gears began to work. Ticking away grudgingly. The dark coagulation of emotions that had taught him, a long time ago, just how far he could sink – eased. In the face of something as vast, as consuming, as all-encompassing as that anger, that fear; well. Everything else was – not simple, and never straightforward – at least acceptable.

He reached out, bumped his fist against Oikawa’s.

His best friend’s mouth opened. Closed. Uncomprehending.

The air was unbearably close. The sunlight washed their surroundings a steel-like, blinding gold. Under one foot, the concrete pavement was a furnace, melting the rubber into flesh. Sweat trickled down Hajime’s neck, plastered cotton to skin. Like any other day in the past twelve summers, and all that lay before.  

“Hey,” he said. “Tooru. I love you, too.”


End file.
